
\%\QdO^ 



Issued Semi-Monthly 
Sepiember to June 



Number 105 



December 2, 1896 



winrmrm 



'^r^^mi?^;r^iAt^:i::^^^^^^^^ 



^g><^g^^L^j^^1U)g^^^^ 




Single Numbers FIFTEEN CENTS 
Double Numbers THIRTY CENTS 



Triple Numbers FORTY-FIVE CENTS 
Quadruple Numbers FIFTY CENTS 
Yearly Subscription $5.00 



€l^e IBitemDe titctature Veriest. 

With Introductions, Notes, Historical Sketches, and Biogi'aphical Sketches. 
Kach regular single number, paper, 15 cents. 

1. Longfellow's Evangeline.* tt 

2. Longfellow's Courtsuip of Miles Standish ; Elizabeth.* 

3. Longfellow's Courtship of Miles Standish. Dramatized. 

4. Whittier's Saow-Bound, and Other Poems.* f | ** 

5. 'Whittier's Mabel Martin, and Other Poems.** 

f). Holmes's Grandmother's Story of Bunker Hill Battle, etc.** 
7, 8, !). Hawthorne's Grandfather's Chair : True Stories from New 
England History. 1G20-1S03. In tliree parts. +$ 

10. Hawthorne's Biographical Stories. With Questions.** 

11. Longfellow's Children's Hour, and Other Selections.** 
V2. Studies in Longfellow. Thirty-two Topics for Study. 

13, 14. Longfellow's Song of Hiawatha. In two parts.J 

15. Lowell's Under the Old Elm, and Other Poems.** 

1(3. Bayard Taylor's Lars : a Pastoral of Norway ; and Other Poems. 

17, IS. Hawthorne's Wonder-Book. In two parts. f 

19, 20. Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography. In two parts.J 

21. Benjamm Franklin's Poor Richaid's Almanac, etc. 

22, 23. Hawthorne's Tanglewood Tales. In two parts.]: 

24. Washington's Rules of Conduct, Letters and Addresses.* 

25, 2(). Longfellow's Golden Legend. In two parts. J 

27. Thoreau's Succession of Forest Trees, Sounds, and Wild Applea 

With a Biographical Sketch by R. W. Emekson. 

28. John Burroughs's Birds and Bees.** 

29. Hawthorne s Little Daffy downdilly, and Other Stories.** 

30. Lowell's Vision of Sir Launfal, and Other Pieces. ff ** 

31. Holmes's My Hunt after the Captain, and Other Papers.* 

32. Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Speech, and Other Papers. 

33. 34, 35. Longfellow's Tales of a W^ayslde Inn. In three parts.Jt 

36. John Burroughs's Sharp Eyes, and Other Papers.** 

37. Charles Dudley Warner's A-Hunting of the Deer, etc.* 

38. Longfellow's Building of the Ship, and Other Poems. 

39. Lowell's Books and Libraries, and Other Papers. 

40. Hawthorne's Tales of the White Hills, and Sketches.** 

41. Whittier's Tent cu. the Beach, and Associated Poems. 

42. Emerson's Po'tune of the Republic, and Other Essays, including 

the American Scholar. 

43. Ulysses among the Phseacians. From W. C Bryant's Translation 

of Homer's Odyssey. 

44. Edgeworth's Waste Not, Want Not ; and The Barring Out. 

45. Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome. 

46. Old Testament Stories in Scripture Language. 

47. 4.^. Fables and Folk Stories. In two parts-J 
49, 50. Hans Andersen's Stories. In two parts, t 

51, 52. Washington Irving : Essays from the Sketch Book. [51.] Rip 

Van Whikle, and other American Essays. [52.] The Voyage, and other English 

Essays. In two parts. % 
53. Scctt's Lady cf the Lake. Edited by W. J. Rolfe. With copious 

notes and numerous illustrattons. {Double Number, 30 cents. Also, in Eolfe^s 

Stuaents'' Series, cloth, to Teachers, 53 cents.) 

Vi 
Also, bound ir linen : * 25 cents. ** 29 and 10 in one vol., 40 cents ; likewise 28 
and 36, 4 and 5, 6 and 31, 15 and 30, 40 and 69, 11 and 63. J Also in one toI , 40 cents. 
JJ 1, 4, and 3C also m one vol., 50 cents ; likewise 7, 8, and 9 : 33, 34. and 35. 



SDtje J^emoe llitcrature ^eric0 



ESSAY ON BURNS 






THOMAS tJARLYLE 



EDITED 

WITH INTRODUCTION AND NOTES 
By GEORGE R. NOYES 




^oCiO 



l#'^ 



HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 

Boston : 4 Park Street ; New York ; H East Seventeenth Street 
Chicago : 158 Adams Street 

^tje JiitiErJitic press, (JTv^mbribge 



• V, 



^\A 



3'^ 






Copyright, 1896, 
By HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. 

All rights reserved. 



The Eiverside Press, Cambridffe, Mass., U. S. A, 
Electrotyped and Printed by H. 0. Hougliton and Company. 



: INTRODUCTION. 

Carlyle's Essay on Burns was first printed in the 
[Edinburgh Review for December, 1828. Though in form 
a review of the Life of Robert Burns, by John Gibson 
Loekhart, it is really, like many of the articles in the 
Edinburgh Review, an entirely independent work. The 
present art of book reviewing is a creation of our own 
times. The English magazines of the eighteenth century 
were mere publishers' organs, and are inferior to even 
second-rate periodicals of our own day. The book notices 
in them are comparable to those that we see in our poorer 
daily newspapers. The reviewers were usually mere liter- 
ary hacks, and were content to give a summary of the con- 
tents of a book, and then j3ass judgment on it as a whole, 
meting out praise or blame in set, formal terms. The 
foundation of the Edinburgh Review, in 1802, by Jeffrey, 
Sydney Smith, Brougham, and others, marks the beginning 
of a new era in English periodical literature. The new 
magazine had for contributors men of marked learning 
and originality, leaders in the thought of their time, who 
were not satisfied, in reviewing a book, with recording the 
impression that any sane man would gather from a casual 
reading, but took the title of the book as the text for a 
thoroughly original treatment of its subject. Succeeding 
periodicals, as the Quarterly and Blackwood's, however 
much they differed from the Edinburgh in politics and 
general tendencies, were all affected by its methods. So 
it happens that many book reviews in the English maga- 
zines, by men like Carlyle, Macaulay, and Matthew Arnold, 
have become permanent additions to literature, sometimes 
surpassing in interest the works that occasioned them. 



iv CARLYLE'S ESSAY ON BURNS. 

In the present case, however, the book reviewed con- 
tinues to be a standard authority. Its author, John Gibson 
Lockhart, was born in 1794, at Cambusnethan, about twelve 
miles southeast of Glasgow. When BlackivoocTs Magazine 
was founded, in 1817, Lockhart became one of its chief 
contributors. In 1820 he married the eldest daughter of 
Sir Walter Scott. In the years following his marriage he 
published several novels, an edition of Don Quixote, and 
his translations of A7icient Spanish Ballads. This last 
work has never been superseded, and is often reprinted. 
In 1826 he became editor of the Quarterly Review, and 
retained the position until the year before his death, in 
1854. His Life of Robert Burns appeared in 1828, and a 
Life of Napoleon Bonaparte in the next year. His great- 
est work, the Life of Scott, appeared in 1836-38, and by 
general consent has taken in English biographical literature 
a place second only to that of Boswell's Life of Johnson. 

Carlyle was introduced to Lockhart when on a visit to 
London, in 1832. In his Note Book at that time he calls 
Lockhart "a precise, brief, active person of considerable 
faculty," and confesses that he " rather liked the man." -^ 
A month later, in a letter to his brother, he calls him " not 
without force, but barren and unfruitful." ^ Seven years 
after this, when Carlyle was settled in London, he formed 
the project of writing an article on the working-classes for 
the Quarterly ; with this in mind he called upon Lockhart, 
and, he says, "found him a person of sense, good breeding, 
even kindness." ® Ever after this, though the two men were 
never intimate friends, they had warm affection and esteem 
for each other. Lockhart feared to accept Carlyle's article 
because of its radical opinions, and it was published sepa- 
rately, under the title of Chartism. One more link between 

1 Froude : Thomas Carlyle, a History of the First Forty Years of 
his Life, ii. 188. 

2 Ibid., ii. 212. 

^ Quoted in Froude : Thomas Carlyle, a History of his Life in 
London, i. 140, from a letter of Carlyle's to his brother. 



INTRODUCTION. V 

the men is Carlyle's review — one of his least satisfac- 
tory essays — of the Life of Scott, published in 1838, in 
the London and Westminster Bevlew. And Carlyle's own 
judgment of Lockhart widens our knowledge of the char- 
acter of both men. 

" A hard, proud, but thoroughly honest, singularly intel- 
ligent, and also affectionate man, wliom in the distance I 
esteemed more than perhaps he ever knew. Seldom did I 
speak to him ; but hardly ever without learning and gaining 
something." ^ 

Thomas Carlyle was born December 4, 1795, at Annan- 
dale, in Dumfriesshire, in southeast Scotland. His life 
offers many resemblances, though perhaps more contrasts, 
to that of Burns. Like Burns, he came from the strong, 
rough stock of the Scotch peasantry. Of liis father, James 
Carlyle, a man like Burns's father in his strength of char- 
acter and deeply religious temperament, but unlike him 
in his complete ignorance of all books except the Bible, 
Carlyle has himself left us a grand portrait in the Remi- 
niscences. When ten years old, Carlyle was sent to the 
Annan grammar school. Of his life there we may judge 
from the veiled account in Sartor Resartus : — 

" My Teachers were hide-bound Pedants, without know- 
ledge of man's nature, or of boy's ; or of aught save their 
lexicons and quarterly account-books. Innumerable dead 
Vocables (no dead Language, for they themselves knew 
no Language) they crammed into us, and called it foster- 
ing the growth of mind. . . . The Professors knew syntax 
enough ; and of the human soul thus much : that it had a 
faculty called Memory, and could be acted-on throi\gli t!ie 
muscular integument by the appliance of bircli-rods." ^ 

James Carlyle recognized his son's ability, and resolved 

1 See note by Carlyle in Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Car- 
lyle, ed. Froude, i. 107. 

2 Sartor Resartus, II. iii. 



VI CARLYLES ESSAY ON BURNS. 

that he should be an educated man. Yet Carlyle can 
hardly be said to have been " sent " to the University, for 
he walked the distance of seventy miles over rough coun- 
try to Edinburgh. There he worked industriously in the 
library, and laid the foundations for his wonderful know- 
ledge of books. He tells us later : — 

" What I have found the University did for me, was that 
it taught me to read in various languages and various sci- 
ences, so that I could go into the books that treated of these 
things, and try anything I wanted to make myself master 
of gradually, as I found it suit me." -^ 

Carlyle had been intended for the ministry, but money 
was lacking, and he took up school teaching as a temporary 
occupation. In 1818, having saved ninety pounds, he re- 
turned to Edinburgh for study. Meanwhile, the ministry 
had become closed to him, for reading and thought had 
undermined his belief in the creed of the Scotch Kirk. 
But Carlyle's reaction from his ancestral beliefs was occa- 
sioned by different circumstances from that of Burns. 
Carlyle,' by deep study and meditation, was stirred from 
the dogmas of the Scotch Kiik, but adhered strictly to its 
stern, severe code of morals. Burns, who had a lighter, 
more facile nature, became disgusted with the hypocrisy of 
those high in church authority, and was attracted by the 
more winning characters of the leaders of the progressive 
party. His passions had already weakened his morals ; 
and though he still professed the highest respect for religion 
in the abstract, he was led on from distrust of orthodox 
Calvinism to what often seems general skej^ticism and in- 
difference on religious matters. 

After an experiment in legal study, Carlyle finally settled 
on his trade as a " writer of books." From 1818 to 1822 
he lived in Edinburgh, and did hack literary work, largely 
articles for the Edinhurgh Encydopoedia. In 1822 he 

^ Address delivered to the Students of Edinhurgh University — April 
2, 1866. 



INTRODUCTION. vii 

became tutor in a private family, with whom he travelled, 
not returning to Edinburgh until 1825. During these years 
of indecision as to what should be his life pursuit he had 
been occupied with German literature, and had published 
his translation of Wilhelm Meister and his Life of Schil- 
ler. For these works he received grateful acknowledg- 
ment from Goethe, and by them established a reputation as 
a writer. In 1827 he met Jeffrey, and made a contract 
with him to write for the Edinburgh Review. 

Meanwhile, in 1826, Carlyle had married Jane Baillie 
Welsh. Two years later, through the failure of some liter- 
ary plans, he decided to remove, for the sake of economy, to 
his wife's farm of Craigenputtock, in southwest Dumfries- 
shire, in the wild moorland country, fifteen miles from any 
town. There he resolved, in S23ite of poverty, to publish no 
work that did not satisfy his ideal. Carlyle's impressions 
of his hermit life vary with his changing moods, — now he 
praises his home as a rural paradise ; again he writes in his 
diary, " Finished a paper on Burns September 16, 1828, at 
this Devil's Den, Craigenputtock." ^ 

This last phrase shows us that the Essay on Burns was 
one of the first products of Carlyle's self - imposed exile. 
Of all his essays, this is on the topic nearest to the author's 
life. Carlyle was drawn to his subject by every bond of 
race, language, and association. His birthplace, Annandale, 
is only ten miles from Dumfries, Burns's last home. He 
had talked with many who had known Burns in life, among 
them Gilbert Burns, the poet's brother. Though an esti- 
mate of the merits of the essay will be more appropriate 
later, some circumstances connected with its publication 
must here be noted, for the light which they throw on Car- 
lyle's character. The account of them is quoted, with some 
small changes, from Froude, 

Jeffrey '' found the article long and diffuse, though he 

^ Froude : Thomas Carlyle, a History of the First Forty Years of 
his Life. ii. 26. 



viii CARLYLE'S ESSAY ON BURNS. 

did not deny that ' it contained much beauty and felicity of 
diction.' He insisted that it must be cut down," and received 
permission from Carlyle to make some alterations.^ " When 
the proof-sheets came, Carlyle found ' the first part cut all 
into shreds, — the body of a quadruped with the head of a 
bird, a man shortened by cutting out the thighs and fixing 
the knee-caps on the hips.' ^ He refused to let it appear 
' in such a horrid shape.' He replaced the most important 
passages, and returned the sheets with an intimation that 
the paper might be cancelled, but should not be mutilated. 
Few editors would have been so forbearing as Jeffrey when 
so audaciously defied. He complained, but he acquiesced. 
He admitted that the article would do the Review credit, 
though it would be called tedious and sprawling by people 
of weight whose mouths he could have stopped. He had 
wished to be of use to Carlyle by keeping out of sight in 
the Review his mannerism and affectation ; but if Carlyle 
persisted he might have his way. 

" Carlyle was touched ; such kindness was more than he 
had looked for. The proud self-assertion was followed by 
humility and almost penitence, and the gentle tone in which 
he wrote conquered Jeffrey in turn. Jeffrey said that he 
admired and approved of Carlyle's letter to him in all 
respects. ' The candour and sweet blood ' which was shown 
in it deserved the highest praise. ' Your virtues are your 
own,' said Jeffrey, ' and you shall have anything you like.' " ^ 

During Carlyle's residence at Craigenputtock, which 
lasted, with slight interruption, for six years, were produced 
most of the miscellaneous essays, and his first great original 
work, Sa7'tor Resartiis. This is the formative period of his 
literary life, from which he came forth, to quote Mr. 

1 Letters of Thomas Carlyle, 1826-1836, p. 123. 

2 Quoted from a letter from Carlyle to his brother, October 10, 1828. 
There is here a reminiscence of the opening- lines of Horace's Ars 
Poetica. 

3 Froude : Thomas Carlyle, a History of the First Forty Years of 
his Life, ii. 31-35. 



INTRODUCTION. ix 

Stephen, "■ a master of his craft." In 1834 he moved to 
London, where he resided until his death, in 1881. To 
this later period belong his greatest works, on which his 
fame depends : ITei^oes and Hero - Worshijj, The Fi'ench 
Revolution, CromwelVs Letters and Sjieeches, and The 
History of Frederick the Great. But the earlier works 
have the same tonic quality as the later, and are free from 
many of their defects. As a teacher, especially if we take 
an American point of view, Carlyle grows less trustworthy 
with advancing years. His cynicism becomes more bitter, 
his hero-worship leads him to sympathize with autocracy, 
while his contempt for the stupidity of the masses leads him 
to distrust all popular government. In Lowell's words, 
quoting Carlyle's contemptuous phrase, " he saw ' only the 
burning of a dirty chimney ' in the war which a great people 
was waging under his very eyes for the idea of nationality 
and orderly magistrature." 

In the Essay on Burns, then, we have a work of Car- 
lyle's early prime. We might infer this from the style 
alone, which shows a transition from his early clearness and 
simplicity to the " piebald, entangled, hyper-metaphorical 
style of writing " characteristic of his later works, and 
always associated with his name. 

In the Essay on Burns it is not the author's intention to 
give a connected sketch of Burns's life,^ or to pass a cool, 
critical judgment on his poetry as a whole. Carlyle has 
himself, on page 6 of this essay, given us his idea of the 
true purpose of biography. The following words from his 
second essay on Richter make his meaning still clearer : — 

" If the acted life of a ^jm^s Vates is so high a matter, 
the written life, which, if i^roperly written, would be a 
translation and interpretation thereof, must also have great 
value. It has been said that no Poet is equal to his Poem, 
which saying is partially true ; but in a deeper sense, it 

^ For this reason, a brief sketch of the poet's life is given the reader 
after this Introduction. See pp. xiv.-xvii. 



X CARLYLE'S ESSAY ON BURNS. 

may also be asserted, and with still greater truth, that no 
Poem is equal to its Poet. Now, it is Biography which 
first gives us both Poet and Poem ; by the significance of 
the one, elucidating and completing that of the other. That 
ideal outline of himself, which a man unconsciously shadows 
forth in his writings, and which, rightly deciphered, will be 
truer than any other representation of him, it is the task of 
the Biographer to fill up into an actual coherent figure, and 
bring home to our experience, or at least clear, undoubting 
admiration, thereby to instruct and edify us in many ways. 
Conducted on such principles, the Biography of great men, 
especially of great poets, that is, of men in the highest 
degree noble minded and wise, might become one of the 
most dignified and valuable species of composition. As 
matters stand, indeed, there are few Biographies that ac- 
complish anything of this kind ; the most are mere Indexes 
of a Biography, which each reader is to write out for him- 
self, as he peruses them ; not the living body, but the dry 
bones of a body, which should have been alive. To expect 
any such Promethean virtue in a common Life-writer were 
unreasonable enough. How shall that unhappy Biographic 
brotherhood, instead of writing like Index-makers and Gov- 
\ ernment-clerks, suddenly become enkindled with some sparks 
of intellect, or even of genial fire ; and not only collecting 
dates and facts, but making use of them, look beyond the 
surface and economical form of a man's life, into its sub- 
stance and spirit ? " 

In pursuit of this great aim, Carlyle has to adapt his 
method to his subject. In writing of Richter, a man un- 
known to the British public of his time, he has to give us 
himself the " dry bones " of fact, before he can give the 
"' living body." But in the case of Burns, as he can assume 
that his readers are familiar with Barns's chief poems, and 
know the main events of his life, he brushes aside all de- 
tail, and treats at once the inner meaning and value of the 
poet's life and work. To appreciate Carlyle's essay, we must 



INTRODUCTION. xi 

fulfil his expectation of us, and know Burns at first hand 
before we start to read about him. 

We must now ask how far Carlyle corresponds to his own 
ideal biographer. No one can read tliis essay without ad- 
mitting that we have in it a powerful and sympathetic con- 
ception of Burns. To decide whether this conception is 
just and impartial we must take into account the writer's 
general temperament and leading ideas. 

Carlyle is a hero-worshipper in all his work, as a quota- 
tion from Sa7'toi' Resartus will best explain : — 

" Meanwhile, observe with joy, so cunningly has Nature 
ordered it, that whatsoever man ought to obey, he cannot but 
obey. Before no faintest revelation of the Godlike did he 
ever stand irreverent ; least of all, when the Godlike showed 
itself revealed in his fellow-man. Thus there is a true 
religious Loyalty forever rooted in his heart; nay in all 
ages, even in ours, it manifests itself as a more or less 
orthodox Her o-ivor ship. In which fact, that Hero-worship 
exists, has existed, and will forever exist, universally among 
Mankind, mayest thou discern the corner-stone of living- 
rock, whereon all Politics for the remotest time may stand 
secure. 

" Hast thou forgotten Paris and Voltaire ? How the 
aged, withered man, though but a skeptic, mocker, and mil- 
linery Court-poet, yet because even he seemed the Wisest, 
Best, could drag mankind at his chariot - wheels, so that 
princes coveted a smile from him, and the loveliest of 
France would have laid their hair beneath his feet. All 
Paris was one vast Temple of Hero-worship ; though their 
Divinity, moreover, was of feature too apish." ^ 

As Carlyle is fallible, like other men, the practical effect 
of his doctrine is that he exalts those whom he likes, and 
throws contempt on those whom he dislikes. Since he is 
attracted by Burns's noble qualities, above all by his sin- 
cerity, he forms a grand ideal conception of him. Indeed, 
1 Sartor Resartus, HI. vii. 



xii CARLYLRS ESSAY ON BURNS. 

in his Helloes and Hero- Worships written twelve years later, 
he boldly jDi'onounces Burns "" the most gifted British soul 
we had in all that century of his." The lecture upon " the 
hero as man of letters " should be studied carefully by all 
who wish to understand Carlyle's attitude towards the great 
writers of the world, and towards Burns as one of them. 
It would, however, be of small use to read, as a sort of 
postscript to this essay, the half-dozen pages which Carlyle 
there devotes especially to Burns. He there repeats many 
of the thoughts of this essay, — when a writer has once 
clearly and fully spoken his mind of a man he cannot well 
treat of him again without repetition. The value of the 
lecture on " the hero as man of letters " is, that it gives us 
in brief form general ideas, of which the Essay on Burns 
is a particular application. 

In consequence of his conception of Burns as a hero, 
Carlyle casts aside, as of slight importance in the general 
estimate, evidence that ojDposes his own view, or even en- 
tirely refuses to believe it. Thus he dwells on Burns's 
finest poems, and i)ays little heed to his affected English 
verse and stilted prose. Yet they, too, are of Burns's 
writing, and demand full consideration, if we are to under- 
stand the whole man. Again, he will not credit an anecdote 
for which there is fairly good evidence, because it shows in 
Burns a foolish vanity that seems to him impossible. So, 
at the best, our essay gives only a partial view of Burns. 
Those who wish to learn more of the seamy side of the 
poet's character will do well to read an essay by as loyal a 
son of Scotland, and as kindly and sympathetic a writer, as 
Carlyle himself, — Robert Louis Stevenson.^ 

Much more might be said in dispraise of Carlyle's work, 
and yet its essential greatness would remain unaffected. 
After the lapse of nearly seventy years, this essay is still 
by far our best portrait of Burns. All succeeding critics 
have had to take Carlyle into account. They may differ 
1 In Familiar Studies of Men and Books. 



INTRODUCTION. xiii 

widely from his conclusions, but they cannot fall to recognize 
his transcendent merits. Though the judgments of Carlyle 
on Burns have, in the main, stood well the test of time, yet 
in this, as in all his writings, his excellence lies less in his 
own opinions than in his power to make others think for 
themselves. Carlyle has little of the finish, proportion, dis- 
crimination, that we find in Matthew Arnold or Sainte- 
Beuve. But for the ordinary reader he is far more useful 
than many a writer who comes nearer the absolute truth. 
He touches our hearts and arouses our sympathies. Most 
readers of a critic ask, not : " After reading this essay can 
I distinguish more accurately between the good and bad 
art in my author, and judge better of their comparative 
importance?" but: " Does this critic make me more able 
to understand the best that is in my poet, so that I share 
more deeply in his highest life and thought ? " Let us 
then, with due reverence, approach the thoughts of one of 
the greatest thinkers of Scotland upon the greatest of her 
poets. 



A SKETCH OF THE LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. ' 

Robert Burns was born on January 25, 1759, in a clay- 
built cottage, at Alloway in Ayrshire, in southwest Scotland. 
Except for the personal character of his father, his lot was 
that of any poor peasant lad. But the elder Burns had a 
natural love of learning, attended carefully to his sons' edu- 
cation himself, and, further, gave them as good schooling 
as it lay in his power to do. The teacher of Robert Burns 
and his younger brother Gilbert was John Murdoch, a 
young man of uncommon merit, who interested himself in 
the boys, and lent them various books. Robert grew thor- 
oughly familiar with his small library, learned French fairly 
well, and began Latin. He was particularly fascinated by 
a book of English songs, and carried it with him into the 
fields. He early became noted as the best converser and 
the best letter writer in the parish. When Burns was still 
a child his father had removed to another farm, at Mount 
Oliphant ; latei', when Burns was eighteen, to Lochlea, in 
the parish of Tarbolton. The family affairs were never 
long prosperous ; and the distress endured at Mount Oli- 
phant from a tyrannical factor^ or landlord's agent, is com- 
memorated in The Tiva Dogs, just as the happy home life 
is reproduced in The Cotter's Saturday Night. Through 
all his youth Burns was a laborer for his father ; and his 
first song, Handsome Nell, written when he was only fifteen, 
is in honor of a chance partner in the harvest field. 

In 1782, when he was twenty-three years old. Burns en- 
gaged in business at the town of Irvine, but was reduced to, 
poverty by the burning of his shop, and returned to Lochlea. 
The short residence at the thriving seaport affected for the 



SKETCH OF ROBERT BURNS. xv 

worse his habits of life and thought. Until then Burns 
had led an ordinarily correct life ; but at Irvine he learned 
to drink, and to think lightly of infidelity to women. The 
Foefs Welcome to his Illegitimate Child bears sad witness 
to this alteration in his character. 

In 1784, soon after Burns's return home, his father died, 
leaving his affairs in utter ruin. Three months before his 
death Robert and Gilbert had taken the farm of Mossgiel, 
in the neighboring parish of Mauchline, and thither the 
whole family now removed. The years 1785 and 1786 are 
Burns's great period of poetical production ; within them 
fall most of the pieces, exclusive of Tarn O'Shanter and of 
his songs, by which he is now best known. At this time 
the theological controversy between the two parties in the 
Scotch Kirk occupied the attention of every one. Burns 
was attracted by the personal character of the leaders of 
the New Light, or progressive, party ; and aided them in 
theii: warfare upon the Old Light divines by many stinging 
satires, notably The Holy Fair, The Tiva Herds, and Holy 
Willie's Frayer. Readers to-day have come to have a new 
interest in the Old TAghts, or Atdd Lichts, as the Scotch 
term is, through J. M. Barrie's tales and sketches. 

In 1785 Burns met and fell in love with Jean Armour, 
and the next year twin children were born to them. Burns, 
in order to save the girl from disgrace, had given her a 
written acknowledgment of marriage ; but her father, who 
had a poor opinion of the i3oet's general character, had 
forced her to destroy this. Burns, finding himself with- 
out money or position in society, resolved to emigrate to 
Jamaica, and published a thin volume of his poems in order 
to raise money for the passage. The success of the book was 
great and immediate, and altered the whole course of Burns's 
life. Dugald Stewart, the philosoi3her, entertained him at 
his house ; Henry MacKenzie, the novelist, gave him a flat- 
tering review ; and, finally, an enthusiastic letter from Dr. 
Blacklock, one of the most celebrated Edinburgh critics, 



xvi CARLYLE'S ESSAY ON BUBNS. 

made him decide to give np his plan of flight from his native 
country, and to try his fortune at the Scotch capital. The 
volume of poems was also the means of his acquaintance 
with the excellent Mrs. Dunlop, with whom he corresponded 
until the end of his life. 

In November, 1786, Burns went to Edinburgh, and was 
the " lion " of the following winter. A new edition of his 
poems received three thousand subscribers, and brought him 
in about £500. Of this he lent £180 to his brother Gilbert, 
to help in the management of Mossgiel, — the loan was 
finally repaid some thirty years later to the poet's family. 
During the following year he made two trips through Scot- 
land, partly to collect songs, and began to contribute to 
Johnson's Scofs Musical Museum and Thomson's Collec- 
tion of Scottish Airs. The poet applied for, and obtained, 
a commission in the Excise, the only worldly advantage, 
except the profits of his j)oems, that he derived from his 
triumphal Edinburgh season. Reserving his commission 
as a last resort, Burns rented a farm at Ellisland, near 
Dumfries, where he settled, in the summer of 1788. He 
had renewed his intimacy with Jean Armour, and, when 
she became once more exposed to the anger of her father, 
made her all the reparation in his power, by marriage. The 
farm was not a success, and Burns tried to carry on the 
Excise business along with it. When this division of labor 
also proved unsatisfactory, he abandoned Ellisland, and, in 
November, 1792, moved to Dumfries. 

At Dumfries Burns was advanced to all Excise division, 
with a salary of seventy pounds, and retained the position 
until his death. His hopes of further promotion were cut 
off by his ill-timed expressions of sympathy with the Amer- 
ican Revolution, and with the republican party in France. 
He attended well to the duties of his office, but occasional 
drunkenness and other misconduct brought on him the ill 
favor of the " Dumfries aristocracy." The boon companions 
with whom he mingled, and the curious tourists attracted by 



SKETCH OF ROBERT BURNS. xvii 

his fame, were in no small measure the cause of his poor 
success. On January 2, 1793, he writes to Mrs. Dunlop : — 

" Occasionally hard drinking is the devil to me. Against 
this I have again and again bent my resolution, and have 
greatly succeeded. Taverns I have totally abandoned : it 
is the private parties in the family way, among the hard- 
drinking gentlemen of this country, that do me the mis- 
chief." 

The poet's excesses did not keep him from being an affec- 
tionate father, and attending carefully to his children's edu- 
cation. He died on July 21, 1796. 

Burns's life since leaving Edinburgh had, on the whole, 
been one of decline. With the exception of his songs, 
which he never ceased to contribute to Thomson's Collection 
of Scottish Airs, and of Tarn 0' Shanter, written at Ellis- 
land, he had produced no important poem since that time. 
But this sketch of Burns's life must not attempt an esti- 
mate of his character as poet or man. Its only object is to 
furnish for ready reference a few of the facts necessary for 
understanding Carlyle's work. 



BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE. 

Every author should be studied, as far as possible, from his 
own writings. Carlyle's voluminous correspondence furnishes 
rich materials for the history of his life and thought. The best 
editions of his letters are those edited by Professor Charles Eliot 
Norton : Early Letters of Thomas Carlyle (1814-1826), Letters 
of Thomas Carlyle (1826-1836), Correspondence of Thomas Car- 
lyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson. These may be supplemented 
by Froude's edition of the Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh 
Carlyle. Next to these first-hand documents, Froude's Thomas 
Carlyle, in spite of its inaccuracy and its prejudiced point of 
view, will remain the great storehouse of information for stu- 
dents of the subject. There are good short lives of Carlyle by 
John Nichol {English Men of Letters Series) and Richard Garnett 
{GreatWriters Series). The former deals more fully in criticism 
on his literary work. There are excellent critical appreciations 
of Carlyle by James Russell Lowell, Augustine Birrell (in Obiter 
Dicta), and Matthew Arnold (in Essay on Emerson). 

The best way to study Burns is to learn the outline of the 
external events of his life from any short sketch, and then to 
read his poems and letters in chronological order. Besides the 
life by Lockhart, there are good accounts of him by Principal 
Shairp {English Men of Letters Series) and John Stuart Blackie 
{Great Writers Series). Carlyle mentions by name Currie and 
Walker among the biographers of Burns previous to Lockhart. 
Dr. James Currie (1756-1805), a famous Scotch physician, pub- 
lished in 1800 an edition of Burns's works, with an account of 
his life, in aid of the poet's family. The Life of Burns, written 
by Josiah Walker, later Professor of Humanity in Glasgow Uni- 
versity, to accompany an edition of Burns's works published in 
1811, has no permanent value. 

Unlike the other two men, Lockhart does not appeal to us as 
much by his personal character as by his writings. The Life 
and Letters of John Gibson Lockhart, by Andrew Lang, is the best 
book with regard to him. 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 



In the modern a^rrangements of society, it is no 
uncommon thing that a man of genius must, like 
Butler,^ "ask for bread and receive a stone; " for, in 
spite of our grand maxim of supply and demand, it is 
by no means the highest excellence that men are most 
forward to recognize. The inventor of a spinning- 
jenny is pretty sure of his reward in his own day ; but 
the writer of a true poem, like the apostle of a true 
religion, is nearly as sure of the contrary. We do 
not know whether it is not an aggravation of the in- 
justice, that there is generally a posthumous retribu- 
tion. Robert Burns, in the course of Nature, might 
yet have been living; but his short life was spent in 
toil and penury; and he died, in the prime of his 
manhood, miserable and neglected : and yet already 
a brave mausoleum shines over his dust,^ and more 

^ The text followed is that of Carlyle's latest authorized 
form. luipoi'tant variations from the form as printed in the 
Edinburgh Review are pointed out. 

2 Samuel Butler (1612-1680). Hudihras was one of Carlyle's 
favorite books. 

^ "In 1813 a public meeting was held in Dumfries; a sub- 
scription was opened, and, contributions flowing in rapidly from 
all quarters, a costly mausoleum was at length erected on the 
most elevated site which the churchyard presented. Thither 
the remains of the poet were solemnly transferred on the 5th of 
June, 1815." — Lockhart, chap. ix. 

Carlyle used brave ironically in the sense of beautiful, splendid. 



2 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

than one splendid monument has been reared hi other 
places to his fame ; the street where he languished in 
poverty is called by his name ; ^ the highest person- 
ages in our literature have been proud to appear as 
his commentators and admirers; and here is the sixth 
narrative of his life that has been given to the world ! ^ 
Mr. Lockhart thinks it necessary to apologize for 
this new attempt on such a subject: but his readers, 
we believe, will readily acquit him ; or, at worst, will 
censure only the performance of his task, not the 
choice of it. The character of Burns, indeed, is a 
theme that cannot easily become either trite or ex- 
hausted ; and will probably gain rather than lose in 
its dimensions by the distance to which it is removed 
by Time. No man, it has been said, is a hero to his 
valet ; and this is probably true ; but the fault is at 
least as likely to be the valet's as the hero's. For it 
is certain, that to the vulgar eye few things are won- 
derful that are not distant. It is difficult for men to 
believe that the man, the mere man whom they see, 
nay perhaps painfully feel toiling at their side through 
the poor jostlings of existence, can be made of finer 
clay than themselves. Suppose that some dining ac- 
quaintance of Sir Thomas Lucy's, and neighbor of 
John a Combe's,^ had snatched an hour or two from 
the preservation of his game, and written us a Life 

Lockhart says mildly : " The structure is perhaps more gaudy 
than might have been wished." 

1 The name of the Mill Vennel in Dumfries, where Burns lived 
from May, 1793, until his death, was changed to Burns Street. 

2 The five Lives of Burns referred to by Carlyle are probably 
those mentioned by Lockhart, by Walker, Currie, Heron, Irving, 
and Peterkin, In reality the number was still larger. 

•'' To understand these references, read any good sketch of 
Shakespeare's life. 



ESSAY ON BUPiNS. 3 

of Shakespeare! What dissertations should we not 
have had, — not on "Hamlet" and "The Tempest," 
but on the wool-trade, and deer-stealing, and the libel 
and vagrant laws; and how the Poacher became a 
Player; and how Sir Thomas and Mr. John had 
Christian bowels, and did not push him to extremi- 
ties! In like manner, we believe, with respect to 
Burns, that till the companions of his pilgrimage, 
the Plonorable Excise Commissioners, and the Gen- 
tlemen of the Caledonian Hunt,^ and the Dumfries 
Aristocracy, and all the Squires and Earls, equally 
with the Ayr Writers, ^ and the New and Old Light 
Clergy, whom he had to do with, shall have become 
invisible in the darkness of the Past, or visible only 
by light borrowed from Jiis juxtaposition, it will be 
difficult to measure him by any true standard, or to 
estimate what he really w^as and did, in the eighteenth 
century, for his country and the world. It will be 
difficult, we say; but still a fair problem for liter- 
ary historians; and repeated attempts will give us re- 
peated approximations. 

His former Biographers have done something, no 
doubt, but by no means a great deal, to assist us. 
Dr. Currie and Mr. Walker, the principal of these 
writers, have both, we think, mistaken one essentially 
important thing: Their own and the world's true 
relation to their author, and the style in which it be- 

^ " The Caledonian Hunt, an association of the principal of the 
nobility and gentry of Scotland, extended their patronage to onr 
bard. He repaid the notice by a dedication of the enlarged and 
improved [the first Edinburgh^ edition of his poems." — Currie's 
Life of -Burns. 

- In Scotland writer is used loosely of law agents, solicitors, 
attorneys, and the like, and sometimes even of their principal 
clerks. Burns alludes to the Ayr writers in The Brigs of Ayr. 



4 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

came such men to think and to speak of sucli a man. 
Dr. Currie loved the poet truly; more perhaps than 
he avowed to his readers, or even to himself; yet he 
everywhere introduces him with a certain patronizing, 
apologetic air; as if the polite public might think 
it strange and half unwarrantable that he, a man 
of science, a scholar and gentleman, should do such 
honor to a rustic. In all this, however, we readily 
admit that his fault was not want of love, but weak- 
ness of faith; and regret that the first and kindest 
of all our poet's biographers should not have seen 
farther, or believed more boldly what he saw. Mr. 
Walker offends more deeply in the same kind : and 
both err alike in presenting us with a detached cata- 
logue of his several supposed attributes, virtues and 
vices, instead of a delineation of the resulting char- 
acter as a living unity. This, however, is not paint- 
ing a portrait ; but gauging the length and breadth 
of the several features, and jotting down their di- 
mensions in arithmetical ciphers. Nay, it is not so 
much as that : for we are yet to learn by what arts 
or instruments the mind could be so measured and 
gauged. 

Mr. Lockhart, we are happy to say, has avoided 
both these errors. He uniformly treats Burns as 
the high and remarkable man the public voice has 
now pronounced him to be : and in delineating him, 
he has avoided the method of separate generalities, 
and rather sought for characteristic incidents, habits, 
actions, sayings; in a word, for aspects which exhibit 
the whole man, as he looked and lived among his fel- 
lows. The book accordingly, with all its deficiencies, 
gives more insight, we think, into the true character 
of Burns than any prior biography: though, being 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 5 

written on the very popular and condensed scheme of 
an article for "Constable's Miscellany," ^ it has less 
depth than we could have wished and expected from 
a writer of such power; and contains rather more, 
and more multifarious quotations than belong of right 
to an original production. Indeed, Mr. Lockhart's 
own writing is generally so good, so clear, direct and 
nervous, that we seldom wish to see it making place 
for another man's. However, the spirit of the work 
is throughout candid, tolerant and anxiously con- 
ciliating; compliments and praises are liberally dis- 
tributed, on all hands, to great and small; and, as 
Mr. Morris Birkbeck^ observes of the society in the 
backwoods of America, "the courtesies of polite life 
are never lost sight of for a moment." But there are 
better things than these in the volume; and we can 
safely testify, not only that it is easily and pleasantly 
read a first time, but may even be without difficulty 
read again. ^ 

1 The Edinburgh Review owed mucli of its success to Archi- 
bald Constable, its first printer. Constable rose to be one of the 
chief publishers of his time, and is especially famous for his con- 
nection with Scott, but became bankrupt in 1826. Constable^s 
Miscellany of Original and Selected Publications in Literature, 
Science^ and the A7'ts has a pathetic interest as being the poor 
fulfilment of a scheme that he had formed, before his failure, of 
a series of cheap volumes that should sell, he told Scott, " not by 
thousands or tens of thousands, but by hundreds of thousands — 
aye, by millions." 

2 Author of Notes on a Journey in America, from the Coast of 
Virginia to the Territory of Illinois. (London, 1818.) 

2 Carlyle's judgment on Lockhart's work seems to have im- 
proved with reflection. In a letter to his brother, June 10, 1828, 
he writes : " Lockhart had written a kind of Life of Burns, and 
men in general were making another uproar about Burns ; it is 
this Book (a trivial enough one) which I am to pretend reviewing." 



b thoma:s carlyle. 

Nevertheless, we are far from thinking that the 
problemof Burns 's Biography has yet been adequately 
solved. We do not allude so much to deficiency of 
facts or documents, — though of these we are still 
every day receiving some fresh accession, — as to the 
limited and imperfect application of them to the great 
end of Biography. Our notions upon this subject 
may perhaps appear extravagant ; but if an individ- 
ual is really of consequence enough to have his life 
and character recorded for public remembrance, we 
have always been of opinion that the public ought to 
be made acquainted with all the inward springs and 
relations of his character. How did the world and 
man's life, from his particular position, represent 
themselves to his mind? How did co-existing cir- 
cumstances modify him from without; how did he 
modify these from within? With what endeavors 
and what efficacy rule over them; with what resist- 
ance and what suffering sink under them? In one 
word, what and how produced was the effect of so- 
ciety on him; what and how produced was his effect 
on societ}^? He who should answer these questions, 
in regard to any individual, would, as we believe, 
furnish a model of perfection in Biography. Few 
individuals, indeed, can deserve such a stud}^; and 
many lives will be written, and, for the gratification 
of innocent curiosity, ought to be written, and read 
and forgotten, which are not in this sense biograj^hies. 
But Burns, if we mistake not, is one of these few 
individuals; and such a study, at least with such a 
result, he has not yet obtained. Our own contri- 
butions to it, we are aware, can be but scanty and 
feeble; but we offer them with good-will, and trust 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 1 

they may meet with acceptance from those they are 
intended for.^ 

Burns first came upon the world as a prodigy; and 
was, in that character, entertained by it, in the usual 
fashion, with loud, vague, tumultuous wonder, speed- 
ily subsiding into censure and neglect; till his early 
and most mournful death again awakened an enthu- 
siasm for him, which, especially as there was now 
nothing to be done, and much to be spoken, has pro- 
longed itself even to our own time. It is true, the 
"nine days" have long since elapsed; and the very 
continuance of this clamor proves that Burns was no 
vulgar wonder. Accordingly, even in sober judg- 
ments, where, as years passed by, he has come to rest 
more and more exclusively on his own intrinsic merits, 
and may now be well-nigh shorn of that casual radi- 
ance, he appears not only as a true British poet, but 
as one of the most considerable British men of the 
eighteenth century. Let it not be objected that he 
did little. He did much, if we consider where and 
how. If the work performed was small, we must 
remember that he had his very materials to discover ; 
for the metal he worked in lay hid under the desert 
moor, where no eye but his had guessed its existence ; 
and we may almost say, that with his own hand he 
had to construct the tools for fashioning it. For 
he found himself in deepest obscuritj^, without help, 
without instruction, without model; or with models 
only of the meanest sort. An educated man stands, 
as it were, in the midst of a boundless arsenal and 

^ The apologetic expressions in the early part of this essay 
may, as Mr. H. W. Boynton well suggests in his excellent edi- 
tion, be relies of Jeffrey's editing. 



8 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

magazine, filled with all the weapons and engines 
which man's skill has been able to devise from the 
earliest time; and he works, accordingly, with a 
strength borrowed from all past ages. How different 
is his state who stands on the outside of that store- 
house, and feels that its gates must be stormed, or 
remain forever shut against him ! His means are the 
commonest and rudest; the mere work done is no 
measure of his strength. A dwarf behind his steam- 
engine may remove mountains; but no dwarf will 
hew them down with a pickaxe; and he must be a 
Titan that hurls them abroad with his arms. 

It is in this last shape that Burns presents himself. 
Born in an age the most prosaic Britain had yet seen, 
and in a condition the most disadvantageous, where 
his mind, if it accomplished aught, must accomplish 
it under the pressure of continual bodily toil, nay 
of penury and desponding apprehension of the worst 
evils, and with no furtherance but such knowledge 
as dwells in a poor man's hut, and the rhjanes of a 
Ferguson or Ramsay ^ for his standard of beauty, he 
sinks not under all these impediments: through the 
fogs and darkness of that obscure region, his lynx 
eye discerns the true relations of the world and human 
life; he grows into intellectual strength, and trains 
himself into intellectual expertness. Impelled by the 
expansive movement of his own irrepressible soul, he 

^ Carlyle is always extreme in his judgments, and here is un- 
justly contemptuous of men whom, as the quotation from Scott 
below (p. 60) will show. Burns always regarded as his models, 
and whom he often directly and openly imitated. Ramsay has 
been admired by men as different as Pope and Leigh Hunt ; and 
Stevenson, whose estimate of these men in his essay on Some 
Aspects of Robert Burns it would be well to read, places the 
"poor lad Fergusson " even higher than Ramsay. 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 9 

struggles forward into the general view; and with 
haughty modesty lays down before us, as the fruit 
of his labor, a gift which Time has now pronounced 
imperishable. Add to all this, that his darksome 
drudging childhood and youth was by far the kind- 
liest era of his whole life; and that he died in his 
thirty-seventh year: and then ask. If it be strange 
that his poems are imperfect, and of small extent, or 
that his genius attained no mastery in its art? Alas, 
his Sun shone as through a tropical tornado ; and the 
pale Shadow of Death eclipsed it at noon ! Shrouded 
in such baleful vapors, the genius of Burns was never 
seen in clear azure splendor, enlightening the world : 
but some beams from it did, by fits, pierce through; 
and it tinted those clouds with rainbow and orient 
colors, into a glory and stern grandeur, which men 
silently gazed on with wonder and tears! 

We are anxious not to exaggerate ; for it is exposi- 
tion rather than admiration that our readers require 
of us here ; and yet to avoid some tendency to that 
side is no easy matter. We love Burns, and we pity 
him; and love and pity are prone to magnify. Criti- 
cism, it is sometimes thought, should be a cold busi- 
ness; we are not so sure of this;^ but, at all events, 
our concern with Burns is not exclusively that of 
critics. True and genial as his poetry must ajDpear, 
it is not chiefly as a poet, but as a man, that he inter- 
ests and affects us. He was often advised to write 
a tragedy;^ time and means were not lent him for 

^ Here Carlyle touches on the source of his own power, — the 
maxim that the pleasure of criticism deprives us of that of vivid 
appreciation does not apply to him. 

2 The Tragic Fragment printed in Burns's works was written 
when he was only nineteen. And in 1790 Burns told friends 
that he was preparing to write a play on a subject drawn from 
Scottish history. 



10 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

tills ; but tlirougli life he enacted a tragedy, and one 
of the deepest. We question whether the world has 
since witnessed so utterly sad a scene ; whether Napo- 
leon himself, left to brawl with Sir Hudson Lowe, 
and perish on his rock, "amid the melancholy main," 
presented to the reflecting mind such a "spectacle of 
pity and fear" as did this intrinsically nobler, gen- 
tler and perhaps greater soul, wasting itself away in 
a hopeless struggle with base entanglements, which 
coiled closer and closer round him till only death 
opened him an outlet. Conquerors are a class of men 
with whom, for most part, the world could well dis- 
pense ; nor can the hard intellect, the unsjanpathizing 
loftiness and high but selfish enthusiasm of such per- 
sons inspire us in general with any affection ; at best 
it may excite amazement; and their fall, like that of 
a pyramid, will be beheld with a certain sadness and 
awe. But a true Poet, a man in whose heart resides 
some effluence of Wisdom, some tone of the "Eternal 
Melodies," is the most precious gift that can be be- 
stowed on a generation: we see in him a freer, purer 
development of whatever is noblest in ourselves; his 
life is a rich lesson to us ; and we mourn his death as 
that of a benefactor who loved and taught us.^ 

Such a gift had Nature, in her bounty, bestowed 
on us in Robert Burns ; but with queenlike indiffer- 
ence she cast it from her hand, like a thing of no 

1 Though Carlyle never changed his opinion of a true poet, 
his later writings show a very different estimate of the vahie of 
conquerors to the world. After his removal to London, he 
writes but little on literature, and is usually full of scorn for the 
profession of letters. He tends to idealize mere strength of will 
and brute force of character, if accompanied by sincerity. He 
praises the power of silent action; and his favorite heroes are 
men of deeds, like Cromwell and Frederick. 



ESSAY OJV BURNS. 11 

moment; and it was defaced and torn asunder, as an 
idle bauble, before we recognized it. To the ill- 
starred Burns was given the power of making man's 
life more venerable, but that of wisely guiding his 
own life was not given. Destiny, — for so in our 
ignorance we must speak, — his faults, the faults of 
others, proved too hard for him; and that spirit, 
which might have soared could it but have walked, 
soon sank to the dust, its glorious faculties trodden 
under foot in the blossom ; and died, we may almost 
say, without ever having lived. And so kind and 
warm a soul; so full of inborn riches, of love to all 
living and lifeless things ! How his heart flows out 
in sympathy over universal Nature ; and in her bleak- 
est provinces discerns a beauty and a meaning ! The 
"Daisy "falls not unheeded under his ploughshare; 
nor the ruined nest of that " wee, cowering, timorous 
beastie," cast forth, after all its provident pains, to 
"thole the sleety dribble and cranreuch cradd." ^ 
The "hoar visage" of Winter llelights him; he dwells 
with a sad and oft-returning fondness in these scenes 
of solemn desolation; but the voice of the tempest 
becomes an anthem to his ears ; he loves to walk in 
the sounding woods, for "it raises his thoughts to 
Ulm that icalheth on the ivings of the vAnd.''^^ A 
true Poet-soul, for it needs but to be struck, and the 
sound it yields will be music! But observe him 
chiefly as he mingles with his brother men. What 
warm, all-comprehending fellow-feeling; what trust- 

^ See To a Mountain Daisy and To a Mouse. Cranreuch = 
hoar frost. 

2 This passage is snggpsted by a prose entry in Bnrns's Com- 
mon-Place Book (April, 1784), which serves as introduction to 
the poem Winter. The words in italics are from Psalm 104. 



12 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

fill, boundless love; what generous exaggeration of 
the object loved! His rustic friend, his nut-brown 
maiden, are no longer mean and homely, but a hero 
and a queen, whom he prizes as the paragons of 
Earth. The rough scenes of Scottish life, not seen 
by him in any Arcadian illusion, but in the rude con- 
tradiction, in the smoke and soil of a too harsh real- 
ity, are still lovely to him: Poverty is indeed his 
companion, but Love also, and Courage; the simjole 
feelings, the worth, the nobleness, that dwell under 
the straw roof, are dear and venerable to his heart: 
and thus over the lowest provinces of man's existence 
he pours the glory of his own soul ; and they rise, in 
shadow and sunshine, softened and brightened into a 
beauty which other eyes discern not in the highest. 
He has a just self-consciousness, which too often 
degenerates into pride; yet it is a noble pride, for 
defence, not for offence; no cold suspicious feeling, 
but a frank and social one. The Peasant Poet bears 
himself, we might say, like a King in exile: he is 
cast among the low, and feels himself equal to the 
highest ; yet he claims no rank, that none may be dis- 
puted to him. The forward he can repel, the super- 
cilious he can subdue ; pretensions of wealth or ances- 
try, are of no avail with him; there is a fire in that 
dark eye, under which the "insolence of condescen- 
sion " cannot thrive. In his abasement, in his ex- 
treme need, he forgets not for a moment the majesty 
of Poetry and Manhood. And yet, far as he feels 
himself above common men, he wanders not apart 
from them, but mixes warmly in their interests; nay 
throws himself into their arms, and, as it were, en- 
treats them to love him. It is moving to see how, in 
his darkest despondency, this proud being still seeks 



ESSAY ON BUHNS. 13 

relief from friendship; unbosoms himself, often to 
the unworthy; and, amid tears, strains to his glowing- 
heart a heart that knows only the name of friendship. 
And yet he was "quick to learn;" a man of keen 
vision, before whom common disguises afforded no 
concealment. His understanding saw through the 
hollowness even of accomj^lished deceivers ; but there 
was a generous credulity in his heart. And so did 
our Peasant show himself among us ; " a soul like an 
^olian harp, in whose strings the vulgar wind, as 
it passed through them, changed itself into articulate 
melody." ^ And this was he for whom the world 
found no fitter business than quarrelling with smug- 
glers and vintners, computing excise-dues upon tal- 
low, and gauging ale -barrels ! In such toils was that 
mighty Spirit sorrowfully wasted: and a hundred 
years may pass on before another such is given us to 
waste. 

All that remains of Burns, the Writings he has 
left, seem to us, as we hinted above, no more than a 
poor mutilated fraction of what was in him; brief, 
broken glimpses of a genius that could never show 
itself complete ; that wanted all things for complete- 
ness : culture, leisure, true effort, nay even length of 
life. His poems are, with scarcely any exception, 
mere occasiolial effusions; poured forth with little 
premeditation ; expressing, by such means as offered, 
the passion, o]3inion, or humor of the hour. Never 
in one instance was it permitted him to grapple with 

^ The figure is a favorite one witli Burns ; see, for example, 
the passage quoted below, page 30. The present quotation may 
be from Richter (compare p. 81), in whom, according to Mr. 
Boynton, the figure is also frequent. 



14 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

any subject with the full collection of his strength, to 
fuse and mould it in the concentrated fire of his gen- 
ius. To try by the strict rules of Art such imperfect 
fragments, would be at once unprofitable and unfair. 
Nevertheless, there is something in these poems, 
marred and defective as they are, which forbids the 
most fastidious student of poetry to pass them by. 
Some sort of enduring quality they must have: for 
after fifty years of the w^ildest vicissitudes in poetic 
taste, they still continue to be read; nay are read 
more and more eagerly, more and more extensively; 
and this not only by literary virtuosos, and that class 
upon whom transitory causes operate most strongly, 
but by all classes, down to the most hard, unlettered 
and truly natural class, who read little, and especially 
no poetry, except because they find pleasure in it. 
The grounds of so singular and wide a popularity, 
which extends, in a literal sense, from the palace 
to the hut, and over all regions where the Eng- 
lish tongue is spoken, are well worth inquiring into. 
After every just deduction, it seems to imply some rare 
excellence in these works. What is that excellence? 
To answer this question will not lead us far. The 
excellence of Burns is, indeed, among the rarest, 
whether in poetry or prose ; but, at the same time, it 
is plain and easily recognized : his Sincerity^ his in- 
disputable air of Truth. Here are no fabulous woes 
or joys; no hollow fantastic sentimentalities; no wire- 
drawn refinings, either in thought or feeling : the pas- 
sion that is traced before us has glowed in a living 
heart; the opinion he utters has risen in his own un- 
derstanding, and been a light to his own steps. He 
does not write from hearsay, but from sight and expe- 
rience ; it is the scenes that he has lived and labored 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 15 

amidst, that he describes: those scenes, rude and 
humble as they are, have kindled beautiful emotions 
in his soul, noble thoughts, and definite resolves; 
and he speaks forth what is in him, not from any 
outward call of vanity or interest, but because his 
heart is too full to be silent. He speaks it with such 
melody and modulation as he can ; "in homely rustic 
jingle; " but it is his own, and genuine. This is the 
grand secret for finding readers and retaining them : 
let him who would move and convince others, be first 
moved and convinced himself. Horace's rule, /Si vis 
meflere^^ is applicable in a wider sense than the literal 
one. To every poet, to every writer, we might say : 
Be true, if you would be believed. Let a man but 
speak forth with genuine earnestness the thought, the 
emotion, the actual condition of his own heart; and 
other men, so strangely are we all knit together by 
the tie of sympathy, must and will give heed to him. 
In culture, in extent of view, we may stand above 
the speaker, or below him; but in either case, his 
words, if they are earnest and sincere, will find some 
response within us ; for in spite of all casual varieties 
in outward rank or inward, as face answers to face, 
so does the heart of man to man.^ 

This may appear a very simple principle, and one 

1 " Ut ridentibus arrident, ita flentibus adflent 
Humani voltus ; si vis me flere, dolendum est 
Primum ipsi tibi." 

— Ars Poetica, 101-103. 

" As men's faces laugh with those that laugh, so they weep 
with those that weep; if thou wouldst have me weep, thou must 
first feel grief thyself." 

2 Sincerity is the test by which Carlyle judges all men; praise 
of it is one of the keynotes of his writings. Unfortunately he 
often confounds it with mere brute force of character and fixity 
of purpose. 



16 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

which Burns had little merit in discovering. True, 
the discovery is easy enough : but the practical appli- 
ance is not easy ; is indeed the fundamental difficulty 
which all poets have to strive with, and which scarcely 
one in the hundred ever fairly surmounts. A head 
too dull to discriminate the true from the false; a 
heart too dull to love the one at all risks, and to hate 
the other in spite of all temptations, are alike fatal 
to a writer. With either, or as more commonly hap- 
pens, with both of these deficiencies combine a love 
of distinction, a wish to be original, which is seldom 
wanting, and we have Affectation, the bane of litera- 
ture, as Cant, its elder brother, is of morals. How 
often does the one and the other front us, in poetry, 
as in life! Great poets themselves are not always 
free of this vice; nay it is precisely on a certain sort 
and degree of greatness that it is most commonly in- 
grafted. A strong effort after excellence will some- 
times solace itself with a mere shadow of success; 
he who has much to unfold, will sometimes unfold 
it imperfectly. Byron, for instance, was no common 
man: yet if we examine his poetry with this view, 
we shall find it far enough from faultless. Gener- 
ally speaking, we should say that it is not true. He 
refreshes us, not with the divine fountain, but too 
often with vulgar strong waters, stimulating indeed to 
the taste, but soon ending in dislike, or even nausea. 
Are his Harolds and Giaours, we would ask, real 
men ; we mean, poetically consistent and conceivable 
men ? Do not these characters, does not the charac- 
ter of their author, which more or less shines through 
them all, rather appear a thing put on for the occa- 
sion ; no natural or possible mode of being, but some- 
thing intended to look much grander than nature? 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 17 

Surely, all these stormful agonies, this volcanic hero- 
ism, superhuman contempt and moody desperation, 
with so much scowling, and teeth-gnashing, and other 
sulphurous humor, is more like the brawling of a 
player in some paltry tragedy, which is to last three 
hours, than the bearing of a man in the business of 
life, which is to last threescore and ten years. To 
our minds there is a taint of this sort, something 
which we should call theatrical, false, affected, in 
every ons of these otherwise so powerful pieces. Per- 
haps "Don Juan," especially the latter parts of it, is 
the only thing approaching to a sincere work, he 
ever wrote ; the only work where he showed himself, 
in any measure, as he was ; and seemed so intent on 
his subject as, for moments, to forget himself. Yet 
Byron hated this vice; we believe, heartily detested 
it: nay he had declared formal war against it in 
words. So difficult is it even for the strongest to 
make this primary attainment, which might seem the 
simplest of all: to read its oimi consciousness without 
mistakes^ without errors involuntary or wilful! We 
recollect no poet of Burns' s susceptibility who comes 
before us from the first, and abides with us to the 
last, with such a total want of affectation. He is an 
honest man, and an honest writer. In his successes 
and his failures, in his greatness and his littleness, he 
is ever clear, simple, true, and glitters with no lustre 
but his own. We reckon this to be a great virtue ; 
to be, in fact, the root of most other virtues, literary 
as well as moral. 

Here, however, let us say, it is to the poetry of 
Burns that we now allude ; to those writings which he 
had time to meditate, and where no special reason 
existed to warp his critical feeling, or obstruct his 



18 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

endeavor to fulfil It. Certain of his Letters, and 
other fractions of prose composition, by no means 
deserve this praise. Here, doubtless, there is not 
the same natural truth of style ; but on the contrary, 
something not only stiff, but strained and twisted; a 
certain high-flown inflated tone; the stilting emphasis 
of which contrasts ill with the firmness and rugged 
simplicity of even his poorest verses. Thus no man, 
it would apjDear, is altogether unaffected. Does not 
Shakespeare himself sometimes premeditate the sheer- 
est bombast ! But even with regard to these Letters 
of Burns, it is but fair to state that he had two ex- 
cuses. The first was his comparative deficiency in 
language. Burns, though for most part he writes 
with singular force and even gracefulness, is not 
master of English prose, as he is of Scotch verse; 
not master of it, "we mean, in proportion to the depth 
and vehemence of his matter. These Letters strike 
us as the effort of a man to express something which 
he has no organ fit for expressing. But a second and 
weightier excuse is to be found in the peculiarity of 
Burns 's social rank. His correspondents are often 
men whose relation to him he has never accurately 
ascertained ; whom therefore he is either forearming 
himself against, or else unconsciously flattering, by 
adopting the style he thinks will please them.^ At 
all events, we should remember that these faults, 
even in his Letters, are not the rule, but the excep- 
tion. Whenever he writes, as one would ever wish 
^ " How perpetually he [Burns] was alive to the dread of 
being looked down on as a man, even by those who most zeal- 
ously applauded the works of his genius, might perhaps be 
traced through the whole sequence of his letters. When writing 
to men of high station, at least, he preserves, in every instance, 
the attitude of self-defence." — Lockhart, chap. v. 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 19 

to do, to trusted friends and on real interests, his 
style becomes simple, vigorous, expressive, sometimes 
even beautiful. His letters to Mrs. Dunlop are uni- 
formly excellent. 

But we return to his Poetry. In addition to its 
Sincerity, it has another peculiar merit, which in- 
deed is but a mode, or perhaps a means, of the fore- 
going: this displays itself in his choice of subjects; 
or rather in his indifference as to subjects, and the 
power he has of making all subjects interesting. The 
ordinary poet, like the ordinary man, is forever 
seeking in external circumstances the help which can 
be found only in himself. In what is familiar and 
near at hand, he discerns no form or comeliness: 
home is not poetical but prosaic ; it is in some past, 
distant, conventional heroic world, that poetry re- 
sides ; were he there and not here, were he thus and 
not so, it would be well with him. Hence our in- 
numerable host of rose -colored Novels and iron -mailed 
Epics, with their locality not on the Earth, but some- 
where nearer to the Moon. Hence our Virgins of 
the Sun, and our Knights of the Cross, malicious 
Saracens in turbans, and copper-colored Chiefs in 
wampum, and so many other truculent figures from 
the heroic times or the heroic climates, who on all 
hands swarm in our poetry. Peace be with them! 
But yet, as a great moralist proposed preaching to 
the men of this century, so would we fain preach to 
the poets, "a sermon on the duty of staying at home." 
Let them be sure that heroic ages and heroic climates 
can do little for them. That form of life has attrac- 
tion for us, less because it is better or nobler than 
our own, than simply because it is different; and 
even this attraction must be of the most transient 



20 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

sort. For will not our ov/n age, one day, be an an- 
cient one; and Lave as quaint a costume as the rest; 
not contrasted with the rest, therefore, but ranked 
along with them, in resj)ect of quaintness? Does 
Homer interest us now, because he wrote of what 
passed beyond his native Greece, and two centuries 
before he was born ; or because he wrote what passed 
in God's world, and in the heart of man, which is 
the same after thirty centuries? Let our poets look 
to this : is their feeling really finer, truer, and their 
vision deeper than that of other men, — they have 
nothing to fear, even from the humblest subject; is it 
not so, — they have nothing to hope, but an ephem- 
eral favor, even from the highest.^ 

The poet, we imagine, can never have far to seek 
for a subject : the elements of his art are in him, and 
around him on every hand; for him the Ideal world 
is not remote from the Actual, but under it and 
within it : nay he is a poet, precisely because he can 
discern it there. Wherever there is a sky above him, 
and a world around him, the poet is in his place ; for 
here too is man's existence, with its infinite longings 
and small acquirings; its ever-thwarted, ever-renewed 
endeavors; its unspeakable aspirations, its fears and 
hopes that wander through Eternity; and all the 
mystery of brightness and of gloom that it was ever 
made of, in any age or climate, since man first began 

^ Scott, Byron, Moore, Sonthey, and Cooper are the most 
obvious objects of this attack; but they had a host of imitators. 
Carlyle, because of his intense moral earnestness, had no sym- 
pathy with literature written only to give amusement, regard- 
less of truth to life. As usual, his view, though stimulating, 
is one-sided. Many of the most justly famous books, notably 
the Arabian Nights, are great by the pure charm of incident and 
invention. 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 21 

to live. Is there not the fifth act of a Tragedy in 
every deathbed, though it were a peasant's, and a bed 
of heath? And are wooings and weddings obsolete, 
that there can be Comedy no longer? Or are men 
suddenly grown wise, that Laughter must no longer 
shake his sides, but be cheated of his Farce? Man's 
life and nature is, as it was, and as it will ever be. 
But the poet must have an eye to read these things, 
and a heart to understand them; or they come and 
pass away before him in vain. He is a vates^ a seer; 
a gift of vision has been given him. Has life no 
meanings for him, which another cannot equally deci- 
pher? then he is no poet, and Delphi itself will not 
make him one. 

In this respect. Burns, though not perhaps abso- 
lutely a great poet, better manifests his capability, 
better proves the truth of his genius, than if he had 
by his own strength kept the whole Minerva Press ^ 
going, to the end of his literary course. He shows 
himself at least a poet of Nature's own making; and 
Nature, after all, is still the grand agent in making 
poets. We often hear of this and the other external 
condition being requisite for the existence of a poet. 
Sometimes it is a certain sort of training; he must 
have studied certain things, studied, for instance, 
"the elder dramatists," and so learned a poetic lan- 
guage; as if poetry lay in the tongue, not in the 
heart. At other times we are told he must be bred 
in a certain rank, and must be on a confidential foot- 
ing with the higher classes ; because, above all things, 
he must see the world. As to seeing the world, we 

^ " A printing-house in London, which was noted in the eigh- 
teenth century for the puhUcation of trashy sentimental novels." 
— Century Dictionary of Names. 



22 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

apprehend this will cause him little difficulty, if he 
have but eyesight to see it with. Without eyesight, 
indeed, the task might be hard. The blind or the 
purblind man "travels from Dan to Beersheba, and 
finds it all barren." But happily every poet is born 
in the world; and sees it, with or against his will, 
every day and every hour he lives. The mysterious 
workmanship of man's heart, the true light and the 
inscrutable darkness of man's destiny, reveal them- 
selves not only in capital cities and crowded saloons, 
but in every hut and hamlet where men have their 
abode. Nay, do not the elements of all human vir- 
tues and all human vices; the passions at once of a 
Borgia and of a Luther, lie written, in stronger or 
fainter lines, in the consciousness of every individual 
bosom, that has practised honest self-examination? 
Truly, this same world may be seen in Mossgiel and 
Tarbolton, if we look well, as clearly as it ever came 
to light in Crockford's,^ or the Tuileries itself. 

But sometimes still harder requisitions are laid on 
the poor aspirant to poetry ; for it is hinted that he 
should have heen horn two centuries ago; inasmuch 
as poetry, about that date, vanished from the earth, 
and became no longer attainable by men ! ^ Such 
cobweb speculations have, now and then, overhung 
the field of literature; but they obstruct not the 
growth of any plant there: the Shakespeare or the 
Burns, unconsciously and merely as he walks onward, 
silently brushes them away. Is not every genius an 
impossibility till he appear? Why do we call him 
new and original, if we saw where his marble was 
lying, and what fabric he could rear from it? It is 

^ A famous gaming club-house in London. 

^ The reference is to Macaulay, essay on Milton. 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 23 

not the material but the workman that is wanting. 
It is not the dark 2)1 ace that hinders, but the dim eye. 
A Scottish peasant's life was the meanest and rudest 
of all lives, till Burns became a poet in it, and a 
poet of it; found it a mart's life, and therefore signifi- 
cant to men. A thousand battlefields remain unsung ; 
but the "Wounded Hare" has not perished without 
its memorial; a balm of mercy yet breathes on us 
from its dumb agonies, because a poet was there. 
Our "Halloween" had passed and repassed, in rude 
awe and laughter, since the era of the Druids; but 
no Theocritus, till Burns, discerned in it the materi- 
als of a Scottish Idyl: neither was the "Holy Fair" 
any Council of Trent or Koman Jubilee ; but never- 
theless, Superstition and Hypocrisy and Fun having 
been propitious to him, in this man's hand it became 
a poem, instinct with satire and genuine comic life.^ 
Let but the true poet be given us, we repeat it, place 
him where and how you wiU, and true poetry will not 
be wanting. 

Independently of the essential gift of poetic feel- 
ing, as we have now attempted to describe it, a cer- 
tain rugged sterling worth pervades whatever Burns 
has written; a virtue, as of green fields and moun- 
tain breezes, dwells in his poetry; it is redolent of 
natural life and hardy natural men. There is a deci- 
sive strength in him, and yet a sweet native graceful- 
ness : he is tender, he is vehement, yet without con- 
straint or too visible effort; he melts the heart, or 
infiames it, with a power which seems habitual and 
familiar to him. We see that in this man there was 

^ The two poems, Halloioeen and The Holy Fair, must be read 
to understand the references. Any encyclopsedia will explain 
the Council of Trent and the Roman Jubilee. 



24 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

the gentleness, the trembling pity of a woman, with 
the deep earnestness, the force and passionate ardor 
of a hero. Tears lie in him, and consuming fire; as 
lightning lurks in the drops of the summer cloud. 
He has a resonance in his bosom for every note of 
human feeling; the high and the low, the sad, the 
ludicrous, the joyful, are welcome in their turns to 
his "lightly-moved and all-conceiving spirit." And 
observe with what a fierce prompt force he grasps his 
subject, be it what it may! How he fixes, as it were, 
the full image of the matter in his eye ; full and clear 
in every lineament; and catches the real type and 
essence of it, amid a thousand accidents and super- 
ficial circumstances, no one of which misleads him! 
Is it of reason; some truth to be discovered? No 
soj)histry, no vain surface-logic detains him; quick, 
resolute, unerring, he pierces through into the mar- 
row of the question ; and speaks his verdict with an 
emphasis that cannot be forgotten. Is it of descrip- 
tion; some visual object to be represented? No poet 
of any age or nation is more graphic than Burns: 
the characteristic features disclose themselves to him 
at a glance; three lines from his hand and we have 
a likeness. And, in that rough dialect, in that rude, 
often awkward metre, so clear and definite a likeness ! 
It seems a draughtsman working with a burnt stick ; 
and yet the burin of a Retzsch ^ is not more expres- 
sive or exact. 

Of ^ this last excellence, the plainest and most com- 

^ Carlyle had little interest in the fine arts for their own 
sake ; perhaps he was attracted to Retzsch by his illustrations 
of Schiller and Goethe. 

2 The passage beginning here, and extending through the 
quotation on page 27, is not found in the Edinburgh Review. 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 25 

prehensive of all, being indeed the root and founda- 
tion of everi/ sort of talent, poetical or intellectual, we 
could produce innumerable instances from the writ- 
ings of Burns. Take these glimpses of a snowstorm 
from his "Winter Night" (the italics are ours): — 

When biting Boreas, fell and doure, 
Sharp shivers thro' the leafless bow'r, 
And Phcebus gies a short-liv'd glowr 

Far south the lift, 
Dim-darkening thro* thejiaky showW 

Or ivhirling drift : 

*Ae night the storm the steeples rock'd, 
Poor labour sweet in sleep was lock'd, 
While burns loi' snawy wreeths upchok''d 

Wild-eddying swirl, • 

Or thro' the mining outlet bock'd ^ 

Down headlong hurl. 

Are there not "descriptive touches 'Miere? The de- 
scriber saic this thing ; the essential feature and true 
likeness of every circumstance in it; saw, and not 
with the eye only. "Poor labour locked in sweet 
sleep;" the dead stillness of man, unconscious, van- 
quished, yet not unprotected, while such strife of the 
material elements rages, and seems to reign supreme 
in loneliness: this is of the heart as well as of the 
eye ! — Look also at his image of a thaw, and prophe- 
sied fall of the " Auld Brig: " — 

When heavy, dark, continued, a'-day rains 

Wi' deepening deluges o'erflow the plains; 

When from the hills where springs the brawling Coil, 

Or stately Lugar's mossy fountains hoil, 

Or where the Greenock winds his moorland course, 

Or haunted Garpal - draws his feeble source, 

^ Bock'd, vomited. 

2 Fabulosus Hydaspes ! [Note by Carlyle] see Horace : Odes, 
I. 22. 



26 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

Arous'd by blust'ring wiuds and spotting thowes,^ 
In mony a torrent down his snaw-hroo rowesj ^ 
While crashing ice, home on the roaring speat,^ 
Sweeps dams and mills and brigs a' to the gate; 
And from Glenbuek down to the Rottonkey, 
Auld Ayr is just one lengthen'd tumbling sea ; 
Then down ye '11 hurl, Deil nor ye never rise ! 
And dash the gumlie j'aups ^ up to the pouring skies. '^ 

The last line is in itself a Poussin-picture of that 
Deluge ! The welkin has, as it were, bent down with 
its weight; the "gumlie jaups " and the "pouring 
skies" are mingled together; it is a world of rain 
and ruin. — In respect of mere clearness and minute 
fidelity, the Farmer's commendation of his Auld 
Mare in plough or in cart, may vie with Homer's 
Smithy of the Cyclops, or yoking of Priam's Char- 
iot.^ Nor have we forgotten stout Burn-the-wind ^ 
and his brawny customers, inspired by Scotch Drink: 
but it is needless to multiply examples. One other 
trait of a much finer sort we select from multitudes 
of such among his "Songs." It gives, in a single 
line, to the saddest feeling the saddest environment 
and local habitation : — 

The pale Moon is setting beyond the white wave, 
And time is setting wi' me, ; 

1 Thaws that melt the snow in spots. 

2 Rolls. 

" Spate, torrent. 

^ Muddy splashes. 

^ From The Brigs of Ayr. It is the fall of the new brig that 
is prophesied : a strange slip on Carlyle's part. 

" See Iliad, xviii. and xxii. Pope's translation may be bought 
for a few cents ; and is still in many ways the best. 

' A name for a blacksmith, shortened to Burnewin, in Scotch 
Drink. 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 27 

Farewell, false friends ! false lover, farewell ! 
I '11 nae mair trouble them nor thee, O.^ 

This clearness of sight we have called the founda- 
tion of all talent; for in fact, unless we see our ob- 
ject, how shall we know how to place or prize it, in 
our understanding, our imagination, our affections? 
Yet it is not in itself, j)erhaps, a very high excellence ; 
but capable of being united indifferently with the 
strongest, or with ordinary power. Homer surpasses 
all men in this quality : but strangely enough, at no 
great distance below him are Richardson and Defoe. 
It belongs, in truth, to what is called a lively mind; 
and gives no sure indication of the higher endowments 
that may exist along with it. In all the three cases 
we have mentioned, it is combined with great garru- 
lity; their descriptions are detailed, ample and lov- 
ingly exact; Homer's fire bursts through, from time 
to time, as if by accident; but Defoe and Richardson 
have no fire. Burns, again, is not more distinguished 
by the clearness than by the impetuous force of his 
conceptions. Of the strength, the piercing emphasis 
with which he thought, his emphasis of expression 
may give a humble but the readiest proof. Who- 
ever uttered sharper sayings than his; words more 
memorable, now by their burning vehemence, now by 
their cool vigor and laconic pith? A single phrase 
depicts a whole subject, a whole scene. We hear of 
"a gentleman that derived his patent of nobility direct 

1 These lines are incorrectly quoted from an Irish song 
altered by Burns, Opeti the Door to Me, oh ! They should read : 

" The wan Moon is setting behind the white wave, 
And Time is setting with me, oh : 
False friends, false love, farewell ! for mair 
I '11 ne'er trouble them nor thee, oh." 



28 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

from Almighty God." Our Scottish forefathers iu 
the battlefield struggled forward 'S'ec?-z^v/^-s/iOcZ.- "^ 
in this oue word a full vision of horror and carnage, 
perhaps too frightfully accurate for Art ! 

In fact, one of the leading features in the mind of 
Burns is tins vigor of his strictly intellectual percep- 
tions. A resolute force is ever visible in his judg- 
ments, and in his feelings and volitions. Professor 
Stewart says of him, with some surprise : ^ " All the 
faculties of Burns's mind were, as far as I could 
judge, equally vigorous; and his predilection for 
poetry was rather the result of his own enthusiastic 
and impassioned temper, than of a genius exclusively 
adapted to that species of composition. From his 
conversation I should have pronounced him to be 
fitted to excel in whatever walk of ambition he had 
chosen to exert his abilities." But this, if we mis- 
take not, is at all times the very essence of a truly 
poetical endowment. Poetry, except in such cases as 
that of Keats, where the whole consists in a weak- 
eyed maudlin sensibility, and a certain vague random 
tunefulness of nature, is no separate facult}'^, no organ 
which can be superadded to the rest, or disjoined 
from them; but rather the result of their general 
harmony and completion.^ The feelings, the gifts 

^ To William Simpson. Wat, wet. 

^ Diigalcl Stewart, professor of moral philosophy in the Uni- 
versity of Edinburgh, in a letter published in the Life of Burns, 
by Dr. James Currie. 

3 In this sentence, as printed in the Edinhurgh Review, we 
have certainly a trace of Jeftrey's editing (cf. above, p. 7). 
There, by the change of wealc-eyid maudlin into extreme, and of 
random into pervading, the sneer is converted into a compliment. 
Elsewhere Carlyle says of Keats : " The kind of man he was 
gets ever more horrible to me. Force of hunger for pleasure of 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 29 

that exist in the Poet are those that exist, with more 
or less development, in every human soul : the imagi- 
nation, which shudders at the Hell of Dante, is the / 
same faculty, weaker in degree, which called thav 
picture into being. How does the Poet speak to 
men, with power, but by being still more a man than 
they? Shakespeare, it has been well observed, in 
the planning and completing of his tragedies, has 
shown an understanding, were it nothing more, which 
might have governed states, or indited a "Novum 
Organum." What Burns 's force of understanding 
may have been, we have less means of judging: it 
had to dwell among the humblest objects; never saw 
Philosophy; never rose, except by natural effort and 
for short intervals, into the region of great ideas. 
Nevertheless, sufficient indication, if no proof suffi- 
cient, remains for us in his works: we discern the 
brawny movements of a gigantic though untutored 
strength; and can understand how, in conversation, 
his quick sure insight into men and things may, as 
much as aught else about him, have amazed the best 
thinkers of his time and country. 

But, unless we mistake, the intellectual gift of 
Burns is fine as well as strong. The more delicate 
relations of things could not well have escaped his 
eye, for they were intimately present to his heart. 
The logic of the senate and the forum is indispensable, 
but not all-sufficient ; nay perhaps the highest Truth 
is that which will the most certainly elude it. For 

every kind, and want of all other force. . . . Such a structure 
of soul, it would once have been very evident, was a chosen 
' Vessel of Hell.' " (Nichol : Life of Carlyle, chap, v.) Such 
is the absurd result to which Carlyle is led by his view of the 
necessity of a moral aim in all literature. 



30 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

this logic works by words, and "the highest," it has 
been said, "cannot be expressed in words." We are 
not without tokens of an openness for this higher 
truth also, of a keen though uncultivated sense for 
it, having existed in Burns. Mr. Stewart, it will be 
remembered, "wonders," in the passage above quoted, 
that Burns had formed some distinct conception of 
the "doctrine of association." We rather think that 
far subtler things than the doctrine of association 
had from of old been familiar to him. Here for 
instance : — 

"We know nothing," thus writes he, "or next to 
nothing, of the structure of our souls, so we cannot 
account for those seeming caprices in them, that one 
should be particularly pleased with this thing, or 
struck with that, which, on minds of a different cast, 
makes no extraordinary impression. I have some 
favorite flowers in spring, among which are the moun- 
tain-daisy, the harebell, the foxglove, the wild-brier 
rose, the budding birch, and the hoary hawthorn, that 
I view and hang over with particular delight. I 
never hear the loud solitary whistle of the curlew 
in a summer noon, or the wild mixing cadence of a 
troop of gray plover in an autumnal morning, with- 
out feeling an elevation of soul like the enthusiasm 
of devotion or poetry. Tell me, my dear friend, to 
what can this be owing? Are we a piece of machin- 
ery, which, like the ^olian harp, passive, takes the 
impression of the passing accident; or do these work- 
ings argue something 'within us above the trodden 
clod? I own myself partial to such proofs of those 
awful and important realities : a God that made 
all things, man's immaterial and immortal nature, 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 31 

and a world of weal or woe beyond death and the 
grave." 1 

Force and fineness of understanding are often 
spoken of as something different from general force 
and fineness of nature, as something partly indepen- 
dent of them. The necessities of language so require 
it; but in truth these qualities are not distinct and 
independent : except in special cases, and from special 
causes, they ever go together. A man of strong un- 
derstanding is generally a man of strong character; 
neither is delicacy in the one kind often divided from 
delicacy in the other. No one, at all events, is igno- 
rant that in the Poetry of Burns keenness of insight 
keeps pace with keenness of feeling; that his light 
is not more pervading than his warmth. He is a 
man of the most impassioned temper; with passions 
not strong only, but noble, and of the sort in which 
great virtues and great poems take their rise. It is 
reverence, it is love towards all Nature that inspires 
him, that opens his eyes to its beauty, and makes 
heart and voice eloquent in its praise. There is a 
true old saying, that "Love furthers knowledge:" 
but above all, it is the living essence of that know- 
ledge which makes poets; the first principle of its 
existence, increase, activity. Of Burns 's fervid affec- 
tion, his generous all-embracing Love, we have spoken 
already, as of the grand distinction of his nature, 
seen equally in word and deed, in his Life and in his 
Writings. It were easy to multiply examples. Not 
man only, but all that environs man in the material 
and moral universe, is lovely in his sight : " the hoary 
hawthorn," the "troop of gray plover," the "solitary 

1 Letter to Mrs. Dunlop, January 1, 1789. The passage is 
also quoted in Lockhart, chap. viii. 



32 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

curlew," all are dear to him; all live in this Earth 
along with him, and to all he is knit as in mysterious 
brotherhood. How touching, is it, for instance, that, 
amidst the gloom of personal misery, brooding over 
the wintry desolation without him and within him, 
he thinks of the "ourie cattle" and "silly sheep," and 
their sufferings in the pitiless storm I 

I thought me on the ourie cattle, 
Or silly sheep, wha bide this brattle 

O' wintry war, 
Or thro' the drift, deep-lairing, sprattle,^ 

Beneath a scaur. 
Ilk happing bird, wee helpless thing. 
That in the merry months o' spring 
Delighted me to hear thee sing. 

What comes o' thee ? 
Where wilt thou cow'r thy chittering wing ? 

And close thy ee ? ^ 

The tenant of the mean hut, with its "ragged roof 
and chinky wall,"^ has a heart to pity even these! 
This is worth several homilies on Mercy; for it is 
the voice of Mercy herself. Burns, indeed, lives in 
sympathy; his soul rushes forth into all realms of 
being; nothing that has existence can be indifferent 
to him. The very Devil he cannot hate with right 
orthodoxy : — 

But fare you weel, auld Nickie-ben ; 
O, wad ye tak a thought and men'! 
Ye aiblins might — I dinna ken, — 

Still hae a stake ; 
I 'm wae to think upo' yon den. 

Even for your sake ! ^ 

"He is the father of curses and lies," said Dr. Slop; 

1 Struggle. 8 Ihid. 

^ A Winter Night. * Address to the Deil. 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 33 

''and is cursed and damned already." — "I am sorry 
for it," quoth my uncle Tobyl^ — a Poet without 
Love were a physical and metaphysical impossibility. 
But ^ has it not been said, in contradiction to this 
principle, that "Indignation makes verses "? ^ It has 
been so said, and is true enough: but the contradic- 
tion is apparent, not real. The Indignation which 
makes verses is, properly speaking, an inverted Love ; 
the love of some right, some worth, some goodness, 
belonging to ourselves or others, which has been in- 
jured, and which this tempestuous feeling issues forth 
to defend and avenge. No selfish fury of heart, ex- 
isting there as a primary feeling, and without its 
opposite, ever produced much Poetry: otherwise, we 
suppose, the Tiger were the most musical of all our 
choristers. Johnson said, he loved a good hater; by 
which he must have meant, not so much one that 
hated violently, as one that hated wisely ; hated base- 
ness from love of nobleness. However, in spite of 
Johnson's paradox, tolerable enough for once in 
speech, but which need not have been so often adopted 
in print since then, we rather believe that good men 
deal sparingly in hatred, either wise or unwise : nay 
that a "good" hater is still a desideratum in this 
world. The Devil, at least, who passes for the chief 

1 The quotation is from Tristram Shandy, vol. iii. chap. xi. 
Ill the Edinburgh Review it is preceded by the sentence : " He 
did not know, probably, that Sterne had been beforehand with 
him." As a matter of fact, Burns was well acquainted with 
Sterne; and it is perhaps for that reason that Carlyle omitted 
the line when this essay was reprinted, even though he thereby 
made a very abrupt transition. 

■2 The two following paragraphs, including the quotation from 
Burns, were not in the essay as printed in the Edinburgh Review, 

^ "Facit indiffnatio versum." — JuvenaL I. 79. 



34 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

and best of that class, is said to be nowise an amiable 
character.^ v* . 

Of the verses which Indignation makes, Burns has 
also given us speciinejig: and among the best that 
were ever given. Who will forget his "Dweller in 
yon Dungeon dark;" a piece that might have been 
chanted by the Furies of JEschylus? The secrets of 
the infernal Pit are laid bare; a boundless baleful 
"darkness visible; " ^ and streaks of hell-fire quivering 
madly in its black haggard bosom ! 

Dweller in yon Dungeon dark, 
Hangman of Creation, mark ! 
Who in widow's weeds appears. 
Laden with unhonoured years. 
Noosing with care a bursting purse. 
Baited with many a deadly curse ! ^ 

Why should we speak of "Scots wha hae wi' Wal- 
lace bled;" since all know of it, from the king to 
the meanest of his subjects? This dithyrambic was 
composed on horseback; in riding in the middle of 
tempests, over the wildest Galloway moor, in com- 
pany with a Mr. Syme, who, observing the poet's 
looks, forbore to speak, — judiciously enough, for a 
man composing "Bruce's Address" might be unsafe 
to trifle with. Doubtless this stern hymn was singing 
itself, as he formed it, through the soul of Burns ; but 
to the external ear, it should be sung with the throat 

1 Dr. Johnson said of his friend Dr. Bathurst : " Dear Bath- 
urst was a man to my very heart's content; he hated a fool, 
and he hated a rogue, and he hated a Whig. He was a very 
good hater." — Piozzi's Anecdotes of Dr. Johnson. Carlyle him- 
self, in his scornful epigrams at men and institutions that seemed 
to him false and insincere, is a near approach to a " good hater." 

- Cf. Paradise Lost, I. 63. 

8 Ode, Sacred to the Memory of Mrs, Oswald. 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 35 

of the whirlwind. 1 So long as there is warm blood in 
the heart of Scotchman or man, it will move in fierce 
thrills under this war-ode ; the best, we believe, that 
was ever written by any pen. 

Another wild stormful Song, that dwells in our ear 
and mind with a strange tenacity, is ''Macpherson's 
Farewell." Perhaps there is something in the tradi- 
tion itself that cooperates. For was not this grim 
Celt, this shaggy Northland Cacus,^ that "lived a 
life of sturt and strife, and died by treacherie," — 
was not he too one of the Nimrods and Napoleons of 
the earth, in the arena of his own remote misty glens, 
for want of a clearer and wider one? Nay, was there 
not a touch of grace given him ? A fibre of love and 
softness, of poetry itself, must have lived in his sav- 
age heart : for he composed that air the night before 
his execution ; on the wings of that poor melody his 
better soul would soar away above oblivion, pain and 
all the ignominy and despair, which, like an ava- 
lanche, was hurling him to the abyss ! Here also, as 
at Thebes, and in Pelops' line,'^ was material Fate 
matched against man's Free-will; matched in bitter- 
est though obscure duel; and the ethereal soul sank 
not, even in its blindness, without a cry which has 
survived it. But who, except Burns, could have 
given words to such a soul; words that we never lis- 

^ The authority for this account is a letter from ]\Ir. Syme, 
printed in Currie's Life. Burns himself sent Scots lulia hae wi' 
Wallace bled to Thomson September 1, 1793, in company with a 
letter, iu which he says that the song was composed on an even- 
ing walk the day before. 

2 See Virgil, JEneid, viii. 185-279. 

^ The reference is to Milton's II Penseroso. The struggle of 
fate and man's free will is the central idea of the typical Greek 
tragedies. 



36 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

ten to without a strange lialf-barbarous, half-poetic 
fellow-feeling? 

Sae rantiiigly, sae wantonly, 

Sae dauntingly gaed he ; 
He play'd a spring, and danced it round, 

Below the gallows-tree. 

Under a lighter disguise, the same principle of 
Love, which we have recognized as the great charac- 
teristic of Burns, and of all true poets, occasionally 
manifests itself in the shape of Humor. Everywhere, 
indeed, in his sunny moods, a full buoyant flood of 
mirth rolls through the mind of Burns; he rises to 
the high, and stoops to the low, and is brother and 
playmate to all Nature. We speak not of his bold 
and often irresistible faculty of caricature; for this 
is Drollery rather than Humor : but a much tenderer 
sportfulness dwells in him; and comes forth here and 
there, in evanescent and beautiful touches; as in his 
"Address to the Mouse," or the "Farmer's Mare," 
or in his "Elegy on poor Mailie," which last may be 
reckoned his happiest eifort of this kind. In these, 
pieces there are traits of a Humor as fine as that of 
Sterne; ^ yet altogether different, original, peculiar, 
— the Humor of Burns. 

Of the tenderness, the playful pathos, and many 
other kindred qualities of Burns 's Poetry, much more 
might be said; but now, with these poor outlines of 
a sketch, we must prepare to quit this part of our 
subject. To speak of his individual Writings, ade- 
quately and with any detail, would lead us far be- 
yond our limits. As already hinted, we can look on 

1 Tristram Shandy was one of Carlyle's favorite books : Sterne 
probably appealed to him by his humor and kindliness, Cf . p. 
33, above. 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 3T 

but few of these pieces as, in strict critical language, 
deserving the name of Poems : they are rhymed elo- 
quence, rhymed pathos, rhymed sense; yet seldom 
essentially melodious, aerial, poetical. "Tam o' 
Shanter" itself, which enjoys so high a favor, does 
not appear to us at all decisively to come under this 
last category. It is not so much a poem, as a piece 
of sparkling rhetoric ; the heart and body of the story 
still lies hard and dead. He has not gone back, much 
less carried us back, into that dark, earnest, wonder- 
ing age, when the tradition was believed, and when 
it took its rise; he does not attempt, by any new- 
modelling of his supernatural ware, to strike anew 
that deep mysterious chord of human nature, which 
once responded to such things ; and which lives in us 
too, and will forever live, though silent now, or vibrat- 
ing with far other notes, and to far different issues. 
Our German readers will understand us, when we 
say, that he is not the Tieck but the Musiius of this 
tale.i Externally it is all green and living; yet look 
closer, it is no firm growth, but only ivy on a rock. 
The piece does not properly cohere : the strange chasm 
which yawns in our incredulous imaginations between 
the Ayr publichouse and the gate of Tophet, is no- 
where bridged over, nay the idea of such a bridge is 
laughed at; and thus the Tragedy of the adventure 
becomes a mere drunken phantasmagoria, or many- 
colored spectrimi painted on ale-vapors, and the Farce 

1 Both Ludwig Tieck (1773-1853) and Johaim Karl August 
Musaus (1735-1787) worked with materials drawn from popu- 
lar legend. But Musaus, in his most famous work, Volks- 
mcirchen der Deutschen (German Folk-Tales), could not keep from 
introducing his own satirical tone. Thus the book lacks the 
simplicity of genuine folk-lore. Remember that Carlyle had 
already published translations from both these men. 



38 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

alone has any reality. We do not say that Burns 
should have made much more of this tradition; we 
rather think that, for strictly poetical purposes, not 
much tvas to be made of it. Neither are we blind 
to the deep, varied, genial power displayed in what 
he has actually accomplished; but we find far more 
"Shakespearean" qualities, as these of "Tarn o' 
Shanter" have been fondly named, in many of his 
other pieces ; nay we incline to believe that this latter 
might have been written, all but quite as well, by a 
man who, in place of genius, had only possessed talent. 
Perhaps we may venture to say, that the most 
strictly poetical of all his "poems" is one which does 
not appear in Currie's Edition; but has been often 
jmnted before and since, under the humble title of 
"The Jolly Beggars." The subject truly is among 
the lowest in Nature; but it only the more shows our 
Poet's gift in raising it into the domain of Art. To 
our minds, this piece seems thoroughly compacted; 
melted together, refined; and poured forth in one 
flood of true liquid harmony. It is light, airy, soft 
of movement; yet sharp and precise in its details; 
every face is a portrait: that raucle carlin,^ that wee 
A2?oUo, that Son of Mars^ are Scottish, yet ideal; 
the scene is at once a dream, and the very Ragcastle 
of "Poosie-Nansie." ^ Farther, it seems in a consid- 
erable degree complete, a real self-supporting Whole, 
which is the highest merit in a poem. The blanket 
of the Night is drawn asunder for a moment ; in full, 
ruddy, flaming light, these rough tatterdemalions are 
seen in their boisterous revel ; for the strong pulse of 

^ Fearless crone. 

2 The scene of The Jolly Beggars was an actual tavern in 
Mauchline, kept by a Mrs. Gibson, called " Poosie-Nansie." 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 39 

Life vindicates its right to gladness even here; and 
when the curtain closes, we prolong the action, with- 
out effort; the next day as the last, our Caird and 
our Balladmonger are singing and soldiering; their 
"brats and callets " are hawking, begging, cheating; 
and some other night, in new combinations, they will 
wring from Fate another hour of wassail and good 
cheer, impart from the universal sympathy with man 
which this again bespeaks in Burns, a genuine inspi- 
ration and no inconsiderable technical talent are man- 
ifested here. There is the fidelity, humor, warm life 
and accurate painting and grouping of some Teniers,^ 
for whom hostlers and carousing peasants are not 
without significance. It would be strange, doubtless, 
to call this the best of Burns 's writings: we mean 
to say only, that it seems to us the most perfect of 
its kind, as a piece of poetical composition, strictly 
so called. In "The Beggar's Opera," ^ in the "Beg- 
gar's Bush," ^ as other critics ^ have already remarked, 
there is nothing which, in real poetic vigor, equals 
this Cantata; nothing, as we think, which comes 
within many degrees of it. 



But by far the most finished, complete and truly 
inspired pieces of Burns are, without dispute, to be 
found among his "Songs." It is here that, although 
through a small aperture, his light shines with least 
obstruction; in its highest beauty and pure sunny 
clearness. The reason may be, that Song is a brief 
simple species of composition; and requires nothing 

1 David Teniers, the Younger (1610-1690). 

2 By John Gay ri685-1732). 

3 By John Fletcher (1579-1625). 

^ In particular, Lpckhart, chap. ix. * 



40 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

so much for its perfection as genuine poetic feeling, 
genuine music of heart. Yet the Song has its rules 
equally with the Tragedy ; rules which in most cases 
are poorly fulfilled, in many cases are not so much as 
felt. We might write a long essay on the Songs of 
Barns ; which we reckon hy far the best that Britain 
has yet produced : for indeed, since the era of Queen 
Elizabeth, we know not that, by any other hand, 
aught truly worth attention has been accomplished in 
this department. True, we have songs enough "by 
persons of quality;" we have tawdry, hollow, wine- 
bred madrigals; many a rhymed speech "in the flow- 
ing and watery vein of Osorius the Portugal Bishop," ^ 
rich in sonorous words, and, for moral, dashed per- 
haps with some tint of a sentimental sensuality; all 
which many persons cease not from endeavoring to 
sing ; though for most part, we fear, the music is but 
from the throat outwards, or at best from some region 
far enough short of the Soul ; not in which, but in 
a certain inane Limbo of the Fancy, or even in some 
vaporous debatable -land on the outskirts of the Ner- 
vous System, most of such madrigals and rhymed 
speeches seem to have originated. 

With the Songs of Burns we must not name these 
things. Independently of the clear, manly, heartfelt 

^ Jeronymo Osorio (1506-1580), called " the Cicero of Por- 
tugal : " " Men began to hunt more after words than matter; 
more after the clioiceness of the phrase, and the round and 
clean composition of the sentence, and the sweet falling of the 
clauses, and the varying and illustration of their works with 
tropes and figures, than after the weight of matter, worth of 
subject, soundness of argument, life of invention, or depth of 
judfrment. Then grew the flowing and watery vein of Osorius 
the Portugal bishop, to be in price." — Bacon : Of the Advance- 
ment of Beaming, I. iv. 2. 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 41 

sentiment that ever pervades his poetry, liis Songs 
are honest in another point of view : in form, as well 
as in spirit. They do not affect to be set to music, 
but they actually and in themselves are music ; they 
have received their life, and fashioned themselves 
together, in the medium of Harmony, as Venus rose 
from the bosom of the sea. The story, the feeling, is 
not detailed, but suggested; not said, or spouted, in 
rhetorical completeness and coherence; but simg, in 
fitful gushes, in glowing hints, in fantastic breaks, 
in warhlings not of the voice only, but of the whole 
mind. We consider this to be the essence of a song; 
and that no songs since the little careless catches, and 
as it were drops of song, which Shakespeare has here 
and there sprinkled over his Plays, fulfil this condi- 
tion in nearly the same degree as most of Burns 's do. 
Such grace and truth of external movement, too, pre- 
supposes in general a corresponding force and truth 
of sentiment and inward meaning. The Songs of 
Burns are not more perfect in the former quality than 
in the latter. With what tenderness he sings, yet 
with what vehemence and entireness! There is a 
piercing wail in his sorrow, the purest rapture in his 
joy; he burns with the sternest ire, or laughs with 
the loudest or sliest mirth; and yet he is sweet and 
soft, "sweet as the smile when fond lovers meet, and 
soft as their parting tear." If we further take into 
account the immense variety of his subjects; how, 
from the loud flowing revel in "Willie brew'd a Peck 
o' Maut," to the still, rapt enthusiasm of sadness of 
"Mary in Heaven;"' from the glad kind greeting of 
"Auld Lang Syne," or the comic archness of "Dun- 
can Gray," to the fire-eyed fury of "Scots wha hae 
wi' Wallace bled," he has found a tone and words for 



42 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

every mood of man's heart, — it will seem a small 
praise if we rank him as the first of all our Song- 
writers ; for we know not where to find one worthy of 
being second to him. 

It is on his Songs, as we believe, that Burns 's 
chief influence as an author will ultimately be found 
to depend: nor, if our Fletcher's ^ aphorism is true, 
shall we account this a small influence. "Let me 
make the songs of a people," said he, "and you 
shall make its laws." Surely, if ever any Poet might 
have equalled himself with Legislators on this ground, 
it was Burns. His Songs are already part of the 
mother-tongue, not of Scotland only, but of Britain, 
and of the millions that in all ends of the earth si3eak 
a British language. In hut and hall, as the heart 
unfolds itself in many-colored joy and woe of exist- 
ence, the name^ the voice of that joy and that woe, 
is the name and voice which Burns has given them. 
Strictly speaking, perhaps no British man has so 
deeply affected the thoughts and feelings of so many 
men, as this solitary and altogether private individ- 
ual, with means apparently the humblest. ^ 

In another point of view, moreover, we incline to 
think that Burns 's influence may have been consider- 
able: we mean, as exerted specially on the Literature 
of his country, at least on the Literature of Scotland. 
Among the great changes which British, particularly 
Scottish literature, has undergone since that period, 
one of the greatest will be found to consist in its re- 

1 Andrew Fletcher, of Saltonn (1655-1716), in liis Account of 
a Conversation concerning a Right Regulation of Governments for 
the Common Good of Mankind, says : "I knew a very wise man" 
who " beHeved if a man were permitted to make all the ballads, 
he need not care who should make the laws of a nation." 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 43 

markable increase of nationality. Even the English 
writers most popular in Burns 's time were little dis- 
tinguished for their literary j)atriotism, in this its 
best sense. A certain attenuated cosmojjolitanism 
had, in good measure, taken place of the old insular 
home-feeling; literature was, as it were, without any 
local environment; was not nourished by the affec- 
tions which spring from a native soil. Our Grays 
and Glovers ^ seemed to write almost as if in vacuo; 
the thing written bears no mark of place ; it is not 
written so much for Englishmen, as for men; or 
rather, which is the inevitable result of this, for cer- 
tain Generalizations which philosophy termed men. 
Goldsmith is an exception : not so Johnson ; the scene 
of his "Rambler" is little more English than that of 
his "Rasselas." 

But if such was, in some degree, the case with 
England, it was, in the highest degree, the case with 
Scotland. In fact our Scottish literature had, at that 
period, a very singular aspect; unexampled, so far as 
we know, except perhaps at Geneva, where the same 
state of matters appears still to continue. For a long 
period after Scotland became British, we had no liter- 
ature; at the 'date when Addison and Steele were 
writing their "Spectators," our good John Boston 
was writing, with the noblest intent, but alike in defi- 
ance of grammar and philosophy, his "Fourfold State 

1 Richard Glover (1712-1785) was once famous for his epic 
Leonidas. There is an account of him, with specimens of his 
work, in Ward's English Poets. Nothing can better illustrate 
Carlyle's lack of a judicial habit of mind than his coupling Glov- 
er's name with Gray's. Read once more the Elegy tvritten in a 
Country Churchyard, and form your own idea of the correctness 
of Carlyle's opinion. 



44 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

of Man." 1 Then came tlie schisms in our National 
Church, and the fiercer schisms in our Body Politic : 
Theologic ink, and Jacobite blood, with gall enough 
in both cases, seemed to have blotted out the intellect 
of the country: however, it was only obscured, not 
obliterated. Lord Kames made nearly the first at- 
tempt at v/riting English; and ere long, Hume, Rob- 
ertson, Smith, and a whole host of followers, attracted 
hither the eyes of all Europe. And yet in this bril- 
liant resuscitation of our "fervid genius," there was 
nothing truly Scottish, nothing indigenous; except, 
perhaps, the natural impetuosity of intellect, which 
we sometimes claim, and are sometimes upbraided 
with, as a characteristic of our nation. It is curious 
to remark that Scotland, so full of writers, had no 
Scottish culture, nor indeed any English; our cul- 
ture was almost exclusively French. It was by study- 
ing Racine and Voltaire, Batteux and Boileau, that 
Kames had trained himself to be a critic and philoso- 
pher; it Avas the light of Montesquieu and Mably 
that guided Robertson in his political speculations; 
Quesnay's lamp that kindled the lamp of Adam 
Smith. ^ Hume was too rich a man to borrow; and 
perhaps he reacted on the French more than he was 
acted on by them; but neither had he aught to do 
with Scotland ; Edinburgh, equally with La Fleche,^ 

^ Apparently Carlyle's memory was treacherous, like that of 
ordinary mortals : man and work are both given incorrectly 
here. Human Nature in its Fourfold State, by Thomas Boston 
(1677-1732), is still a classic of the Calvmistic theology. 

2 The names are all readily found in any cyclopaedia; except 
possibly that of Charles Batteux (1713-1780), who, as miglit be 
inferred from the text, was a French literary critic of the same 
school as Boileau. 

•^ At one time Hume's residence in France, where he composed 
his Treatise on Human Nature. 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 45 

was but the lodging and laboratory, in which he not 
so much morally lived, as metaphysically investigated. 
Never, perhaps, was there a class of writers so clear 
and well-ordered, yet so totally destitute, to all ap- 
pearance, of any patriotic affection, nay of any human 
affection whatever. The French wits of the period 
were as unpatriotic: but their general deficiency in 
moral principle, not to say their avowed sensuality 
and unbelief in all virtue, strictly so called, render 
this accountable enough. We hope there is a patri- 
otism founded on something better than prejudice; 
that our country may be dear to us, without injury 
to our philosophy; that in loving and justly prizing 
all other lands, we may prize justly, and yet love 
before all others, our own stern Motherland, and the 
venerable Structure of social and moral Life, which 
Mind has through long ages been building up for us 
there. Surely there is nourishment for the better 
part of man's heart in all this: surely the roots, that 
have fixed themselves in the very core of man's being, 
may be so cultivated as to grow up not into briers, 
but into roses, in the field of his life ! Our Scottish 
sages have no such propensities: the field of their 
life shows neither briers nor roses; but only a flat, 
continuous thrashing - floor for Logic, whereon all 
questions, from the "Doctrine of Kent" to the "Nat- 
ural History of Religion," are thrashed and sifted 
with the same mechanical impartiality ! ^ 

With Sir Walter Scott at the head of our litera- 
ture, it cannot be denied that much of this evil is 
past, or rapidly passing away : our chief literary men, 

^ Chapter xi. of Book T. of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations 
has the title Of the Rent of Land. The Natural History of Re- 
ligion is by Hume. 



46 THOMAS CARLYLE, 

whatever other faults they may have, no longer live 
among us like a rren(;h Colony, or some knot of 
Propaganda Missionaries ; but like natural-born sub- 
jects of the soil, partaking and sympathizing in all 
our attachments, humors, and habits. Our literature 
no longer grows in water but in mould, and with the 
true racy virtues of the soil and climate. How much 
of this change may be due to Burns, or to any other 
individual, it might be difficult to estimate. ^ Direct 
literary imitation of Burns was not to be looked for. 
But his examj^le, in the fearless adoption of domestic 
subjects, could not but operate from afar; and cer- 
tainly in no heart did the love of country ever burn 
with a warmer glow than in that of Burns : " a tide 
of Scottish prejudice," 2 as he modestly calls this deep 
and generous feeling, "had been poured along his 
veins; and he felt that it would boil there till the 
flood-gates shut in eternal rest." It seemed to him, 
as if he could do so little for his country, and yet 
would so gladly have done all. One small province 
stood open for him, — that of Scottish Song; and 
how eagerly he entered on it, how devotedly he la- 
bored there! In his toilsome journeyings, this object 
never quits him; it is the little happy-valley of his 
careworn heart. In the gloom of his own affliction, 

1 In spite of the example of Burns, the publisher of Waverley 
hesitated for some time to accept the manuscript, on account 
of the Scotch dialect interwoven in it. Now, on the contrary, a 
local dialect seems a commendation to a work of fiction. 

2 Burns, in his autobiographical letter to Dr. Moore (August 
2, 1787), says, in reference to The History of Sir William Wal- 
lace, one of his first books : "The story of Wallace poured a 
Scotch prejudice in my vems, which will boil along there till the 
flood-gates of life shut in eternal rest." The reader will by this 
time have noticed Carlyle's carelessness about small points. 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 47 

he eagerly searches after some lonely brother of the 
muse, and rejoices to snatch one other name from the 
oblivion that was covering it ! ^ These were early 
feelings, and they abode with him to the end : — 

... A wish (I mind its power), 
A wish, that to ray latest hour 

Will strongly heave my breast, — 
That I, for poor auld Scotland's sake. 
Some useful plan or book could make. 

Or sing a sang at least. 

The rough bur Thistle spreading wide 

Amang the bearded bear, 
I turn'd my weediug-clips aside. 

And spared the symbol dear.^ 

But to leave the mere literary character of Burns, 
which has already detained us too long. Far more 
interesting than any of his written works, as it ap- 
pears to us, are his acted ones: the Life he willed 
and was fated to lead among his fellow-men. These 
Poems are but like little rhymed fragments scattered 
here and there in the grand unrhymed Romance of 
his earthly existence ; and it is only when intercalated 
in this at their proper places, that they attain their 
full measure of significance. And this too, alas! 
was but a fragment ! The plan of a mighty edifice 
had been sketched; some columns, porticos, firm 
masses of building, stand completed; the rest more 
or less clearly indicated; with many a far-stretching 

^ This may refer to Burns's poetical epistles to David Sillar 
and John Lapraik, obscure poets of his own time; or, more 
probably, to his erecting a memorial, at his own expense, over 
the neglected grave of Fergnsson. 

2 Answer to Verses addressed to the Poet by the Guidwife of 
Wauchope House. 



48 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

tendency, which only studious and friendly eyes can 
now trace towards the purposed termination. For 
the work is broken off in the middle, almost in the 
beginning ; and rises among us, beautiful and sad, at 
once unfinished and a ruin ! If charitable judgment 
was necessary in estimating his Poems, and justice 
required that the aim and the manifest power to ful- 
fil it must often be accepted for the fulfilment ; much 
more is this the case in regard to his Life, the sum 
and result of all his endeavors, where his difficulties 
came upon him not in detail only, but in mass; and 
so much has been left unaccomplished, nay was mis- 
taken, and altogether marred. 

Properly speaking, there is but one era in the life 
of Burns, and that the earliest. We have not youth 
and manhood, but only youth: for, to the end, we 
discern no decisive change in the complexion of his 
character; in his thirty-seventh year, he is still, as it 
were, in youth. With all that resoluteness of judg- 
ment, that penetrating insight, and singular maturity 
of intellectual power, exhibited in his writings, (he 
never attains to any clearness regarding himself^ to 
the last, he never ascertains his peculiar aim, even 
with such distinctness as is common among ordinary 
men; and therefore never can pursue it with that 
singleness of will which insures success and some con- 
tentment to such men.^ /To the last, he wavers be- 
tween two purposes: glorying in his talent, like a 
true poet, he yet cannot consent to make this his chief 
and sole glory, and to follow it as the one thing need- 
ful, through poverty or riches, through good or evil 

^ Burns himself says of his early clays, in his autobiographical 
letter to Dr. Moore ; " The great misfortune of ray life was 
never to have an aim," 



E:SSAY ON BURNS. 49 

report. 1 Another far meaner ambition still cleaves to 
liim; he must dream and struggle about a certain 
"Rock of IndeiDcndence ; " which, natural and even 
admirable as it might be, was still but a warring with 
the world, on the comparatively insignificant ground 
of his being more completely or less completely sup- 
plied with money than others; of his standing at a 
higher or at a lower altitude in general estimation 
than others. I For the world still appears to him, as 
to the young, in borrowed colors; he expects from it 
what it cannot give to any man ; seeks for content- 
ment, not within himself, in action and wise effort, 
but from without, in the kindness of circumstances, 
in love, friendship, honor, pecuniary ease. /He would 
be happy, not actively and in himself, but passively 
and from some ideal cornucopia of Enjoyments, not 
earned by his own labor, but shov/ered on him by the 
beneficence of Destiny, f Thus, like a young man, he 
cannot gird himself up for any worthy well-calculated 
goal, but swerves to and fro, between passionate hope 
and remorseful disappointment: rushing onwards 

1 Perhaps Carlyle is misled in his estimate of Burns by his 
own high conception of the vocation of the man of letters. The 
profession of literature is hardly older than our own century ; 
Dr. Johnson is really the first example of it. For a man, un- 
supported by a patron, to make poetry his means of subsistence, 
was almost unknown in the eighteenth century. Burns was too 
proud to depend on a patron, and his refusal to accept money for 
his contributions to Johnson's Museum and Thomson's Scottish 
Aii'S was only in accord with the ideas of his time; besides, he 
feared that such a proceeding would injure his spontaneity. To 
receive pay for a volume of poems, originally written without 
reference to publication, was quite a different matter. 

Carlyle, in his lecture on The Hero as Man of Letters, in He- 
roes and Hero -Worship, develops his own point of view more 
fully. 



50 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

with a deep tempestuous force, he surmounts or 
breaks asunder many a barrier ; travels, nay advances 
far, but advancing only under uncertain gmidance, is 
ever and anon turned from his path; and to the last 
cannot reach the only true happiness of a man, that 
of clear decided Activity in the sphere for which, by 
nature and circumstances, he has been fitted and ap- 
pointed. 

We do not say these things in dispraise of Burns; 
nay, perhaps, they but interest us the more in his 
favor. This blessing is not given soonest to the best; 
but rather, it is often the greatest minds that are 
latest in obtaining it; for where most is to be devel- 
oped, most time may be required to develoj) it. A 
complex condition had been assigned him from with- 
out; as complex a condition from within: no "jDre- 
established harmony " existed between the clay soil 
of Mossgiel and the empyrean soul of Robert Burns ; 
it was not wonderful that the adjustment between 
them should have been long postponed, and his arm 
long cumbered, and his sight confused, in so vast and 
discordant an economy as he had been appointed 
steward over. Byron was, at his death, but a year 
younger than Burns; and through life, as it might 
have appeared, far more simply situated: yet in him 
too we can trace no such adjustment, no such moral 
manhood ; but at best, and only a little before his 
end, the beginning of what seemed such. 

By much the most striking incident in Burns' s 
Life is his journey to Edinburgh; but perhaps a still 
more important one is his residence at Irvine so early 
as in his twenty-third year. Hitherto his life had been 
poor and toilworn; but otherwise not ungenial, and, 
with all its distresses, by no means unhappy. In his 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 51 

parentage, deducting outward circumstances, he had 
every reason to reckon himself fortunate. His father 
was a man of thoughtful, intense, earnest character, 
as the best of our peasants are ; valuing knowledge, 
possessing some, and, what is far better and rarer, 
openminded for more: a man with a keen insight 
and devout heart; reverent towards God, friendly 
therefore, at once, and fearless towards all that God 
has made : in one word, though but a hard-handed 
peasant, a com23lete and fully unfolded Jlaii. Such a 
father is seldom found in any rank in society; and 
was worth descending far in society to seek.^ Unfor- 
tunately he was very poor ; had he been even a little 
richer, almost never so little, the whole might have 
issued far otlierwise. Mighty events turn on a straw; 
the crossing of a brook decides the conquest of the 
world. Had this William Burns 's small seven acres 
of nursery-ground anywise prospered, the boy Eobert 
had been sent to school; had struggled forward, as 
so many weaker men do, to some university; come 
forth not as a rustic wonder, but as a regular well- 
trained intellectual workman, and changed the whole 
course of British Literature, — for it lay in him to 
have done this ! ^ But the nursery did not prosper ; 
poverty sank his whole family below the help of even 
our cheap school-system: Burns remained a hard- 
worked ploughboy, and British literature took its 
own course. Nevertheless, even in this rugged scene 
there is much to nourish him. If he drudges, it is 

1 Burns himself says of his father: "I have met with few 
who understood Men, their manners and their ways, equal to 
him." 

2 These words seem like a prophecy of Carlyle's own career, 
which was just beginning when this essay was written. 



52 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

with his brother, and for his father and mother, Vv^hom 
he loves, and would fain shield from want. AVis- 
dom is not banished from their poor hearth, nor the 
balm of natural feeling : the solemn words, " Let us 
worship God," are heard there from a "priest-like 
father; " ^ if threatenings of unjust men throw mother 
and children into tears, these are tears not of grief 
only, but of holiest affection; every heart in that 
humble group feels itself the closer knit to every 
other; in their hard warfare they are there together, 
a "little band of brethren." Neither are such tears, 
and the deep beauty that dwells in them, their only 
portion. Light visits the hearts as it does the eyes 
of all living : there is a force, too, in this youth, that 
enables him to trample on misfortune ; nay to bind it 
under his feet to make him sport. For a bold, warm, 
buoyant humor of character has been given him ; and 
so the thick-coming shapes of evil are welcomed with 
a gay, friendly irony, and in their closest pressure he 
bates no jot of heart or hope. Vague yearnings of 
ambition fail not, as he grows up; dreamy fancies 
hang like cloud-cities around him; the curtain of 
Existence is slowly rising, in many-colored sj^lendor 
and gloom : and the auroral light of first love is gild- 
ing his horizon, and the music of song is on his path; 
and so he walks 

..." in glory and in joy, 
Behind his plough, upon the mountain side." ^ 

We ourselves know, from the best evidence, that 
up to this date Burns was happy; nay that he was 

^ See The Cotter^s Saturday Night. 

2 Wordsworth : Resolution and Independence (1807 edition). 
Our editions read : " Following his plough, along the mountain 
side." The reference in the poem is to Burns. 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 63 

the gayest, brightest, most fantastic, fascinating being 
to be found in the world; more so even than he ever 
afterwards appeared.^ But now, at this early age, he 
quits the paternal roof; goes forth into looser, louder, 
more exciting society; and becomes initiated in those 
dissipations, those vices, which a certain class of phi- 
losophers have asserted to be a natural preparative 
for entering on active life: a kind of mud-bath, in 
which the youth is, as it were, necessitated to steep, 
and, we suppose, cleanse himself, before the real toga 
of Manhood can be laid on him. We shall not dis- 
pute much with this class of philosophers; we hope 
they are mistaken: for Sin and Remorse so easily 
beset us at all stages of life, and are always such in- 
different company, that it seems hard we should, at 
any stage, be forced and fated not only to meet but 
to yield to them, and even serve for a term in their 
leprous armada. We hope it is not so. Clear we 
are, at all events, it cannot be the training one re- 
ceives in this Devil's service, but only our determin- 
ing to desert from it, that fits us for true manly 
Action. We become men, not after we have been 
dissipated, and disappointed in the chase of false 
pleasure ; but after we have ascertained, in any way, 
what impassable barriers hem us in through this life; 
how mad it is to hope for contentment to our infinite 
soul from the gifts of this extremely finite world; 

^ Apparently the " best evidence " is conflicting. Burns, in 
his autobiographical letter to Dr. Moore, says of himself as a 
boy : " I was, perhaps, the most ungainly, awkward being in the 
parish." And Murdock, Burns's schoolmaster, in a letter printed 
in Carrie's Life and reproduced in Lockhart's, says : "Robert's 
ear was remarkably dull, and his voice untunable. . . . Robert's 
countenance was generally grave and expressive of a serious, 
contemplative, and thoughtful mind." 



54 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

that a man must be sufficient for himself; and that 
for suffering and enduring there is no remedy but 
striving and doing. Manhood begins when we have 
in any way made truce with necessity; begins even 
when we have surrendered to necessity, as the most 
part only do ; but begins joyfully and hopefully only 
when we have reconciled ourselves to Necessity; and 
thus, in reality, triumphed over it, and felt that in 
Necessity we are free. Surely such lessons as this 
last, which, in one shape or other, is the grand lesson 
for every mortal man, are better learned from the 
lips of a devout mother, in the looks and actions of 
a devout father, while the heart is yet soft and pliant, 
than in collision with the sharp adamant of Fate, 
attracting us to shipwreck us, when the heart is 
grown hard, and may be broken before it will become 
contrite. Had Burns continued to learn this, as he 
was already learning it, in his father's cottage, he 
would have learned it fully, which he never did; and 
been saved many a lasting aberration, many a bitter 
hour and year of remorseful sorrow. 

It seems to us another circumstance of fatal import 
in Burns' s history, that at this time too he became 
involved in the religious quarrels of his district; that 
he was enlisted and feasted, as the fighting man of 
the New-Light Priesthood, in their highly unprofit- 
able warfare. At the tables of these freeminded 
clergy he learned much more than was needful for 
him. Such liberal ridicule of fanaticism awakened in 
his mind scruples about Religion itself; and a whole 
world of Doubts, which it required quite another set 
of conjurers than these men to exorcise. We do not 
say that such an intellect as his could have escaped 
similar doubts at some period of his history; or even 



ESSAY ON BL'RNS. 05 

that he could, at a later period, have come through 
them altogether victorious and unharmed: but it 
seems peculiarly unfortunate that this time, above all 
others, should have been fixed for the encounter. 
For now, with principles assailed by evil example 
from without, by "passions raging like demons " ^ from 
within, he had little need of sceptical misgivings to 
whisper treason in the heat of the battle, or to cut 
off his retreat if he were already defeated. He loses 
his feeling of innocence ; his mind is at variance with 
itself; the old divinity no longer presides there; but 
wild Desires and wild Repentance alternately oppress 
him. Ere long, too, he has committed himself before 
the world; his character for sobriety, dear to a Scot- 
tish peasant as few corrupted worldlings can even con- 
ceive, is destroyed in the eyes of men; and his only 
refuge consists in trying to disbelieve his guiltiness, 
and is but a refuge of lies. The blackest desperation 
now gathers over him, broken only by red lightnings 
of remorse. The whole fabric of his life is blasted 
asunder; for now not only his character, but his per- 
sonal liberty is to be lost ; men and Fortune are leagued 
for his hurt; "hungry Ruin has him in the wind." 
He sees no escape but the saddest of all : exile from 
his loved country, to a country in every sense inhos- 
pitable and abhorrent to him. While the "gloomy 
nio'ht is oatherino; fast,"^ in mental storm and soli- 
tude, as well as in physical, he sings his wild farewell 
to Scotland: — 

Farewell, my friends ; farewell, my foes ! 
My peace with these, my love with those : 

^ The phrases are drawn from Burns's letter to Dr. Moore. 



66 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

The bursting tears my heart declare ; 
Adieu, my native banks of Ayr ! ^ 

Light breaks suddenly in on liim in floods; but 
still a false transitory light, and no real sunshine. 
He is invited to Edinburgh; hastens thither with an- 
ticipating heart ; is welcomed as in a triumph, and with 
universal blandishment and acclamation; whatever is 
wisest, whatever is greatest or loveliest there, gathers 
round him, to gaze on his face, to show him honor, 
sympathy, affection. Burns 's appearance among the 
sages and nobles of Edinburgh must be regarded as 
one of the most singular phenomena in modern Lit- 
erature; almost like the appearance of some Napo- 
leon among the crowned sovereigns of modern Pol- 
itics. For it is nowise as "a mockery king,"^ set 
there by favor, transiently and for a purpose, that 
he will let himself be treated, still -less is he a mad 
Rienzi, whose sudden elevation turns his too weak 
head: but he stands there on his own basis; cool, 
unastonished, holding his equal rank from Nature 
herself; putting forth no claim which there is not 
strength in him, as well as about him to vindicate. 
Mr. Lockhart has some forcible observations on this 
point : — 

"It needs no effort of imagination," says he, "to 
conceive what the sensations of an isolated set of 

^ Farewell Song to the Banks of Ayr. The last line should 
read : — 

Farewell, the bonie banks of Ayr. 
2 Shakespeare, Richard II. iv. 1. Carlyle was a man of enor- 
mous reading, and no one can hope to recognize all his allusions. 
But the two books to which he, like most of the great writers of 
modern England, refers most frequently, are within the reach 
of every one : they are the Bible and Shakespeare. 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 57 

scholars (almost all either clergymen or professors) 
must have been in the presence of this big-boned, 
black-browed, brawny stranger, with his great flash- 
ing eyes, who, having forced his way among them 
from the plough-tail at a single stride, manifested in 
the whole strain of his bearing and conversation a 
most thorough conviction, that in the society of the 
most eminent men of his nation he was exactly where 
he was entitled to be; hardly deigned to flatter them 
by exhibiting even an occasional symptom of being 
flattered by their notice; by turns calmly measured 
himself ao^ainst the most cultivated understandinos 
of his time in discussion; overpowered the hon-mots 
of the most celebrated convivialists by broad floods of 
merriment, impregnated with all the burning life of 
genius; astounded bosoms habitually enveloped in the 
thrice - piled folds of social reserve, by compelling 
them to tremble, — nay to tremble visibly, — beneath 
the fearless touch of natural pathos; and all this with- 
out indicating the smallest willingness to be ranked 
among those professional ministers of excitement, 
who are content to be paid in money and smiles for 
doing what the spectators and auditors would be 
ashamed of doing in their own persons, even if they 
had the power of doing it; and last, and probably 
worst of all, who was known to be in the habit of 
enlivening societies which they would have scorned 
to approach, still more frequently than their own, 
with eloquence no less magnificent; with wit, in all 
likelihood still more daring; often enough, as the 
superiors whom he fronted without alarm might have 
guessed from the beginning, and had ere long no oc- 
casion to guess, with wit pointed at themselves." ^ 
1 Lockhart, chap. v. 



58 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

The farther we remove from this scene, the more 
singular will it seem to us: details of the exterior 
aspect of it are already full of interest. Most readers 
recollect Mr. Walker's personal interviews with Burns 
as among the best passages of his Narrative : a time 
will come when this reminiscence of Sir Walter Scott's, 
slight though it is, will also be precious : — 

"As for Burns," writes Sir Walter, "I may truly 
say, Virgilium vidi tantum.^ I was a lad of fifteen in 
1786-87, when he came first to Edinburgh, but had 
sense and feeling enough to be much interested in his 
poetry, and would have given the world to know 
him : but I had very little acquaintance with any lit- 
erary people, and still less with the gentry of the west 
country, the two sets that he most frequented. Mr. 
Thomas Grierson was at that time a clerk of my 
father's. He knew Burns, and promised to ask him 
to his lodgings to dinner; but had no opportunity to 
keep his word; otherwise I might have seen more of 
this distinguished man. As it was, I saw him one 
day at the late venerable Professor Ferguson's, ^ where 
there were several gentlemen of literary reputation, 
among whom I remember the celebrated Mr. Dugald 
Stewart. Of course, we youngsters sat silent, looked 
and listened. The only thing I remember which was 
remarkable in Burns's manner, was the effect pro- 
duced uj^on him by a print of Bunbury's,^ represent- 
ing a soldier lying dead on the snow, his dog sitting 
in misery on one side, — on the other, his widow, 

1 Ovid, Tristia, IV. x. 51. 

^ Adam Ferguson (1723-1816), professor of philosophy at 
Edinburgh University. He was succeeded by Dugald Stewart. 

^ Henry William Bunbury (1750-1811) was an amateur 
artist and caricaturist of some note. 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 59 

with a child in her arms. These lines were written 
beneath : — 

' Cold on Canadian hills, or Minden's plain, 
Perhaps that mother wept her soldier slain ; 
Bent o'er her babe, her eye dissolved in dew, 
The big' drops mingling- with the milk he drew, 
Gave the sad presage of his fnture years. 
The child of misery baptised in tears.' 

"Burns seemed much affected by the print, or 
rather by the ideas which it suggested to his mind. 
He actually shed tears. He asked whose the lines 
were; and it chanced that nobody but myself remem- 
bered that they occur in a half-forgotten poem of 
Langhorne's called by the unpromising title of ' The 
Justice of Peace. ' ^ I whispered my information to 
a friend present; he mentioned it to Burns, who re- 
warded me with a look and a word, which, though of 
mere civility, I then received and still recollect with 
very great pleasure. 

"His person was strong and robust; his manners 
rustic, not clownish; a sort of dignified plainness and 
simplicity, which received part of its effect perhaps 
from one's knowledge of his. extraordinary talents. 
His features are represented in Mr. Nasmyth's^ 23ic- 
ture: but to me it conveys the idea that they are 
diminished, as if seen in perspective. I think his 

1 The poem may be fonnd in Chalmers's British Poets, vol. 
xvi., under the title The Country Justice. There the second line 
reads : " Perhaps that parent mourn'd her soldier slain." John 
Langhorne (1735-1779) and his brother William made the trans- 
lation of Plutarch's Lives which, in spite of its dreary style, is 
still the one in general use. 

2 Alexander Nasmyth (1758-1840) painted in 1787 a bust 
portrait of Burns, which is the likeness most commonly repro- 
duced. 



60 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

countenance was more massive than it looks in any of 
the portraits. I should have taken the poet, had I 
not known what he was, for a very sagacious country 
farmer of the old Scotch school, i. <?., none of your 
modern agriculturists who keep laborers for their 
drudgery, but the douce gudeman who held his own 
plough. There was a strong expression of sense and 
shrewdness in all his lineaments; the eye alone, I 
think, indicated the poetical character and tempera- 
ment. It was large, and of a dark cast, which glowed 
(I say literally glowed) when he spoke with feeling 
or interest. I never saw such another eye in a hu- 
man head, though I have seen the most distinguished 
men of my time. His conversation expressed per- 
fect self-confidence, without the slightest presumption. 
Among the men who were the most learned of their 
time and country, he expressed himself with perfect 
firmness, but without the least intrusive forwardness : 
and when he differed in opinion, he did not hesitate 
to express it firmly, yet at the same time with mod- 
esty. I do not remember any part of his conversa- 
tion distinctly enough to be quoted; nor did I ever 
see him again, except in the street, where he did 
not recognize me, as I could not expect he should. 
He was much caressed in Edinburgh: but (consid- 
ering what literary emoluments have been since his 
day) the efforts made for his relief were extremely 
trifling. 

"I remember, on this occasion I mention, I thought 
Burns 's acquaintance with English poetry was rather 
limited; and also that, having twenty times the abili- 
ties of Allan Ramsay and of Ferguson, he talked of 
them with too much humility as his models: there 
was doubtless national predilection in his estimate, 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 61 

*'This is all 1 can tell you about Burns. I have 
only to add, that his dress corresponded with his 
manner. He was like a farmer dressed in his best 
to dine with the laird. I do not speak iti malum 
partem^ when I say, I never saw a man in company 
with his superiors in station or information more per- 
fectly free from either the reality or the affectation 
of embarrassment. I was told, but did not observe 
it, that his address to females was extremely deferen- 
tial, and always with a turn either to the pathetic or 
humorous, which engaged their attention particularly. 
I have heard the late Duchess of Gordon remark this. 
— I do not know anything I can add to these recollec- 
tions of forty years since." ^ 

The conduct of Burns under this dazzling blaze of 
favor; the calm, unaffected, manly manner in which 
he not only bore it, but estimated its value, has justly 
been regarded as the best proof that could be given 
of his real vigor and integrity of mind. A little 
natural vanity, some touches of hypocritical modesty, 
some glimmerings of affectation, at least some fear 
of being thought affected, we could have pardoned 
in almost any man; but no such indication is to be 
traced here. In his unexampled situation the young 
peasant is not a moment perplexed; so many strange 
lights do not confuse him, do not lead him astray. 
Nevertheless, we cannot but perceive that this win- 
ter did him great and lasting injury. A somewhat 
clearer knowledge of men's affairs, scarcely of their 
characters, it did afford him; but a sharper feeling 
of Fortune's unequal arrangements in their social 
destiny it also left with him. He had seen the gay 
and gorgeous arena, in which the powerful are born 
1 Quoted in Lockhart, chap. v. 



62 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

to play their parts; nay had himself stood in the 
midst of it; and he felt more bitterly than ever, that 
here he was but a looker-on, and had no part or lot 
in that splendid game. From this time a jealous in- 
dignant fear of social degradation takes possession of 
him ; and perverts, so far as aught could pervert, his 
private contentment, and his feelings towards his 
richer fellows. It was clear to Burns that he had 
talent enough to make a fortune, or a hundred for- 
tunes, could he but have rightly willed this; it was 
clear also that he willed something far different, and 
therefore could not make one. Unhaj^py it was that 
he had not power to choose the one, and reject the 
other; but must halt forever between two opinions, 
two objects; making hampered advancement towards 
either. But so is it with many men: we "long for 
the merchandise, yet would fain keep the price; " and 
so stand chaffering with Fate in vexatious altercation, 
till the night come, and our fair is over! 

The Edinburgh Learned of that period were in 
general more noted for clearness of head than for 
warmth of heart: with the exception of the good old 
Blacklock,^ whose help was too ineffectual, scarcely 
one among them seems to have looked at Burns wdth 
any true sympathy, or indeed much otherwise than as 
at a highl}^ curious tJdng. By the great also he is 
treated in the customary fashion; entertained at their 

1 Lockhart gives in a foot-note (at end of chap, iv.) the fol- 
lowing- quotation from a letter of Dr. Johnson to Mrs. Thrale, 
August 17, 1773 : — 

" This morning I saw at breakfast Dr. Blackloek, the blind 
poet, who does not remember to have seen light, and is read 
to by a poor scholar in Latin, Greek, and French. He was 
originally a poor scholar himself. I looked on him with rev- 
erence," 



ESSAY ON BURNS. t>'6 

tables and dismissed : certain modica of pudding and 
praise are, from time to time, gladly exchanged for 
the fascination of his presence; which exchange once 
effected, the bargain is finished, and each party goes 
his several way. At the end of this strange season, 
Burns gloomily sums up his gains and losses, and 
meditates on the chaotic future. In money he is 
somewhat richer; in fame and the show of happiness, 
infinitely richer; but in the substance of it, as poor 
as ever. Nay poorer ; for his heart is now maddened 
still more with the fever of worldly Ambition; and 
through long years the disease will rack him with un- 
profitable sufferings, and weaken his strength for all 
true and nobler aims. 

What Burns was next to do or to avoid; how a 
man so circumstanced was now to guide himself 
towards his true advantage, might at this point of 
time have been a question for the wisest. It was a 
question too, which apparently he was left altogether 
to answer for himself : of his learned or rich patrons 
it had not struck any individual to turn a thought on 
this so trivial matter. Without claiming for Burns 
the praise of perfect sagacity, we must say, that his 
Excise and Farm scheme does not seem to us a very 
unreasonable one; that we should be at a loss, even 
now, to suggest one decidedly better. Certain of his 
admirers have felt scandalized at his ever resolving 
to gauge ; and would have had him lie at the pool, 
till the spirit of Patronage stirred the waters, that 
so, with one friendly plunge, all his sorrows might 
be healed. 1 Unwise counsellors! They know not 
the manner of this spirit; and how, in the lap of 
most golden dreams, a man might have happiness, 
I Cf. John V. 1-9, 



G4 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

were it not that in the interim he must die of hunger ! 
It reflects credit on the manliness and sound sense of 
Burns, that he felt so early on what ground he was 
standing; and preferred self-help, on the humblest 
scale, to dependence and inaction, though with hope 
of far more splendid possibilities. But even these 
possibilities were not rejected in his scheme: he might 
expect, if it chanced that he had any friend, to rise, 
in no long period, into something even like opulence 
and leisure; while again, if it chanced that he had 
no friend, he could still live in security; and for the 
rest, he "did not intend to borrow honor from any 
profession."^ We reckon that his plan was honest 
and well-calculated : all turned on the execution of it. 
Doubtless it failed; yet not, we believe, from any 
vice inherent in itself.^ ^^y? after all, it was no 
failure of external means, but of internal, that over- 
took Burns. His was no bankruptcy of the purse, 

^ Words of Burns quoted in Lockhart, chap. vii. 

2 "If Burns had much of a farmer's skill, he had little of 
a farmer's prudence and economy. I once inquired of James 
Corrie, a sagacious old farmer, whose ground marched with 
Elliesland, the cause of the poet's failure. * Faith,' said he, 
* how could he miss but fail, when his servants ate the bread as 
fast as it was baked ? I don't mean figuratively, I mean liter- 
ally. Consider a little. At that time close economy was neces- 
sary to have enabled a man to clear twenty pounds a year by 
Elliesland. Now Burns's own handy work was out of the ques- 
tion; he neither ploughed, nor sowed, nor reaped, at least like a 
hard-working farmer; and then he had a bevy of servants from 
Ayrshire. The lasses did nothing but bake bread, and the lads 
sat by the fireside, and ate it warm, with ale. Waste of time 
and consumption of food would soon reach to twenty pounds a 
year.'" — (Letter to Lockhart from Allan Cunningham, quoted 
in Lockhart's Life, chap, vii.) 



ESSAY ON BifRNS. 65 

but of the soul; to his last day, he owed no man any 
thing. 1 

Meanwhile he begins well : with two good and wise 
actions. His donation to his mother, munificent from 
a man whose income had lately been seven pounds 
a-year, was worthy of him, and not more than worthy. 
Generous also, and worthy of him, was the treatment 
of the woman whose life's welfare now depended on 
his pleasure. A friendly observer might have hoped 
serene days for him: his mind is on the true road 
to peace with itself: what clearness he still wants 
will be given as he proceeds ; for the best teacher of 
duties, that still lie dim to us, is the Practice of those 
we see and have at hand. Had the "patrons of gen- 
ius," who could give him nothing, but taken nothing 
from him, at least nothing more ! The wounds of his 
heart would have healed, vulgar ambition would have 
died away. Toil and frugality would have been wel- 
come, since Virtue dwelt with them; and Poetry 
would have shone through them as of old : and in her 
clear ethereal light, which was his own by birthright, 
he might have looked down on his earthly destiny, 
and all its obstructions, not with patience only, but 
with love. 

But the patrons of genius would not have it so. 
Picturesque tourists, ^ all manner of fashionable dan- 

^ In reality Burns occasionally borrowed money ; but at his 
death he left only a few small debts. 

2 There is one little sketch by certain " English gentlemen " 
of this class, which, though adopted in Currie's narrative, and 
since then repeated in most others, we have all along felt 
an invincible disposition to regard as imaginary : " On a rock 
that projected into the stream, they saw a man employed in 
angling, of a singular appearance. He had a cap made of fox- 
skin on his head, a loose greatcoat fixed round him by a belt, 



G6 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

glers after literature, and, far worse, all manner of 
convivial Maecenases, ^ hovered round him in his re- 
treat; and his good as well as his weak qualities se- 
cured them influence over him. He was flattered by 
their notice; and his warm social nature made it im- 
possible for him to shake them off, and hold on his 
way a]3art from them. These men, as we believe, 
were proximately the means of his ruin. Not that 
they meant him any ill; they only meant themselves 
a, little good; if he suffered harm, let Jam look to it! 
But they wasted his precious time and his precious 
talent; they disturbed his composure, broke down 
his returning habits of temperance and assiduous 
contented exertion. Their pampering was baneful to 
him; their cruelty, which soon followed, was equally 
baneful. The old grudge against Fortune's inequality 
awoke with new bitterness in their neighborhood; 
and Burns had no retreat but to "the Rock of Inde- 

from which depended an enormous Highland broad-sword. It 
was Burns." Now, we rather think, it was not Burns. For, to 
sa}' nothing of the foxskin cap, the loose and quite Hibernian 
watchcoat with the belt, what are we to make of this "enormous 
Highland broad- sword " dej)ending from him ? More especially, 
as there is no word of parish constables on the outlook to see 
whether, as Dennis phrases it, he had an eye to his own midriff 
or that of the public ! Burns, of all men, had the least need, 
and the least tendency, to seek for distinction, either in his own 
eyes or those of others, by such poor mummeries. — [Carlyle's 
note.] 

Carlyle thinks this petty vanity inconsistent with Burns's 
wise self-control at Edinburgh. But we cannot reason thus in 
the case of a man with so variable a temperament, and the 
anecdote is fairly well authenticated. 

1 Meecenas w^as the great literary patron of the Augustan age 
of Rome. Virgil addressed to him his Georgics, and Horace 
honors his name repeatedly. 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 67 

pendence," which is but an air-castle after all, that 
looks well at a distance, but will screen no one from 
real wind and wet. Flushed with irregular excite- 
ment, exasperated alternately by contempt of others, 
and contempt of himself, Burns was no longer regain- 
ing his peace of mind, but fast losing it forever. 
There was a hollowness at the heart of his life, for 
his conscience did not now approve what he was 
doing. 

Amid the vapors of unwise enjoyment, of bootless 
remorse, and angry discontent with Fate, his true 
loadstar, a life of Poetry, with Poverty, nay with 
Famine if it must be so, was too often altogether 
hidden from his eyes. And yet he sailed a sea, 
where without some such loadstar there was no risht 
steering. Meteors of French Politics rise before him, 
but these were not his stars. An accident this, which 
hastened, but did not originate, his worst distresses. 
In the mad contentions of that time, he comes in col- 
lision with certain official Superiors; is wounded by 
them; cruelly lacerated, we should say, could a dead 
mechanical implement, in any case, be called cruel: 
and shrinks, in indignant pain, into deeper self -seclu- 
sion, into gloomier moodiness than ever. His life 
has now lost its unity: it is a life of fragments; led 
with little aim, beyond the melancholy one of securing 
its own continuance, — in fits of wild false joy when 
such offered, and of black despondency when they 
passed away. His character before the world begins 
to suffer: calumny is busy with him; for a miserable 
man makes more enemies than friends. Some faults 
he has fallen into, and a thousand misfortunes; but 
deep criminality is what he stands accused of, and 
they that are not without sin cast the first stone at 



68 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

him I For is he not a well-wisher to the French 
Revolution, a Jacobin, and therefore in that one act 
guilty of all? These accusations, political and moral, 
it has since appeared, were false enough: but the 
world hesitated little to credit them.^ Nay his con- 
vivial Maecenases themselves were not the last to do it. 
There is reason to believe that, in his later years, 
the Dumfries Aristocracy had partly withdrawn them- 
selves from Burns, as from a tainted person, no longer 
worthy of their acquaintance. That painful class, 
stationed, in all provincial cities, behind the outmost 
breastwork of Gentility, there to stand siege and do 
battle against the intrusions of Grocerdom and Gra- 
zierdom, had actually seen dishonor in the society of 
Burns, and branded him with their veto; had, as we 
vulgarly say, cvt him ! We find one passage in this 
Work of Mr. Lockhart's, which will not out of our 
thoughts : — 

"A gentleman of that county, whose name I have 
already more than once had occasion to refer to, has 
often told me that he was seldom more grieved, than 
when riding into Dumfries one fine summer evening 
about this time to attend a county ball, he saw Burns 
walking alone, on the shady side of the principal 
street of the town, while the opposite side was gay 
with successive groups of gentlemen and ladies, all 
drawn together for the festivities of the night, not 
one of whom appeared willing to recognize him. The 
horseman dismounted, and joined Burns, who on his 
proposing to cross the street said ; ' Nay, nay, my 
young friend, that 's all over now; ' and quoted, after 
a pause, some verses of Lady Grizzel Baillie's pathetic 
ballad : — 

1 Lockhart (chap, viii.) devotes much time to confuting them. 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 69 

* His bonnet stood ance fu' fair on his brow, 

His auld ane look'd better than mony ane's new ; 
But now he lets 't wear ony way it will hing, 
And casts himsell dowie upon the corn-bing. 

* O, were we young as we ance hae been, 

We sud hae been gallopping down on yon green, 
And linking it ower the lily-white lea ! 
And werena my heart light, I wad die.^ 

It was little in Burns 's character to let his feelings 
on certain subjects escape in this fashion. He, im- 
mediately after reciting these verses, assumed the 
sprightliness of his most pleasing manner; and taking 
his young friend home with him, entertained him 
very agreeably till the hour of the ball arrived."^ 

Alas ! when we think that Burns now sleeps " where 
bitter indignation can no longer lacerate his heart," ^ 
and that most of those fair dames and frizzled gentle- 
men already lie at his side, where the breastwork of 
gentility is quite thrown down, — who would not sigh 
over the thin delusions and foolish toys that divide 
heart from heart, and make man unmerciful to his 
brother ! 

It was not now to be hoped that the genius of 
Burns would ever reach maturity, or accomplish aught 
worthy of itself. His spirit was jarred in its melody; 
not the soft breath of natural feeling, but the rude 
hand of Fate, was now sweeping over the strings. 
And yet what harmony was in him, what music even 
in his discords I How the wild tones had a charm for 
the simplest and the wisest; and all men felt and 
knew that here also was one of the Gifted ! " If he 

1 Lockhart, chap. viii. 

^ Ubi soiva indlgnatlo cor ulterius lacerare nequit. Swift's Epi- 
taph. [Carlyle's note.] 



70 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

entered an inn at midniglit, after all the inmates were 
in bed, the news of his arrival circulated from the 
cellar to the garret; and ere ten minutes had elapsed, 
the landlord and all his guests were assembled!" 
Some brief pure moments of poetic life were yet ap- 
pointed him, in the composition of his Songs. We 
can understand how he grasped at this employment; 
and how, too, he spurned all other reward for it but 
what the labor itself brought him. For the soul of 
Burns, though scathed and marred, was yet living in 
its full moral strength, though sharply conscious of 
its errors and abasement; and here, in his destitution 
and degradation, was one act of seeming nobleness 
and self-devotedness left even for him to perform. 
He felt, too, that with all the "thoughtless follies" 
that had "laid him low,"^ the world was unjust and 
cruel to him ; and he silently appealed to another and 
calmer time. Not as a hired soldier, but as a patriot, 
would he strive for the glory of his country: so he 
cast from him the poor sixpence a-day, and served 
zealously as a volunteer. Let us not grudge him this 
last luxury of his existence ; let him not have appealed 
to us in vain ! The money was not necessary to him ; 
he struggled through without it: long since, these 
guineas would have been gone, and now the high- 
mindedness of refusing them will plead for him in all 
hearts forever. 

We are here arrived at the crisis of Burns 's life; 
for matters had now taken such a shape with him as 
could not long continue. If improvement was not to 
be looked for. Nature could only for a limited time 
maintain this dark and maddening warfare against 
the world and itself. We are not medically informed 
^ A Bard's Epitaph. 



ESSAY ON BUKXS. 71 

whether any eontiniiaiice of years was, at this period, 
probable for Burns; whether his death is to be looked 
on as in some sense an accidental event, or only as 
the natural consequence of the long series of events 
that had preceded. The latter seems to be the like- 
lier opinion; and yet it is by no means a certain one. 
At all events, as we have said, some change could not 
be very distant. Three gates of deliverance, it seems 
to us, were open for Burns: clear poetical activity; 
madness; or death. The first, with longer life, was 
still possible, though not probable; for physical causes 
were beginning to be concerned in it : and yet Burns 
had an iron resolution; could he but have seen and 
felt, that not only his highest glory, but his -first 
duty, and the true medicine for all his woes, lay here. 
The second was still less probable ; for his mind was 
ever among the clearest and firmest. So the milder 
third gate was opened for him: and he passed, not 
softly yet speedily, into that still country, where the 
hail-storms and fire-showers do not reach, and the 
heaviest-laden wayfarer at length lays down his load ! 

Contemplating this sad end of Burns, and how he 
sank unaided by any real help, uncheered by any 
wise sympathy, generous minds have sometimes fig- 
ured to themselves, with a reproachful sorrow, that 
much might have been done for him ; that by counsel, 
true affection and friendly ministrations, he might 
have been saved to himself and the world. We ques- 
tion whether there is not more tenderness of heart 
than soundness of judgment in these suggestions. It 
seems dubious to us whether the richest, wisest, most 
benevolent individual could have lent Burns any effec- 
tual help. Counsel, which seldom profits any one, 



72 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

he did not need; in his understanding, he knew the 
right from the wrong, as well perhaps as any man 
ever did; but the persuasion, which would have 
availed him, lies not so much in the head as in the 
heart, where no argument or expostulation could have 
assisted much to implant it. As to money again, we 
do not believe that this was his essential want; or 
well see how any private man could, even presuppos- 
ing Burns 's consent, have bestowed on him an inde- 
pendent fortune, wdth much prospect of decisive ad- 
vantage. It is a mortifying truth, that two men, in 
any rank of society, could hardly be found virtuous 
enough to give money, and to take it as a necessary 
gift, without injury to the moral entireness of one or 
both. But so stands the fact : Friendship, in the old 
heroic sense of that term, no longer exists : except in 
the cases of kindred or other legal affinity, it is in 
reality no longer expected, or recognized as a virtue 
among men. A close observer of manners has pro- 
nounced "Patronage," that is, pecuniary or other 
economic furtherance, to be "twice cursed;" curs- 
ing him that gives, and him that takes ! ^ And thus, 
in regard to outward matters also, it has become the 
rule, as in regard to inward it always was and must 
be the rule, that no one shall look for effectual help 
to another; but that each shall rest contented with 
what help he can afford himself. Such, we say, is 
the principle of modern Honor; naturally enough 
growing out of that sentiment of Pride, which we in- 
culcate and encourage as the basis of our whole social 
morality. Many a poet has been poorer than Burns ; 
but no one was ever prouder: we may question 
whether, without great precautions, even a pension 
1 The parody is from The MercTiant ofVenicej iv, 1. 



f 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 73 

from Ro3^alty would not have galled and encumbered, 
more than actually assisted him. 

Still less, therefore, are we disposed to join with 
another class of Burns 's admirers, who accuse the 
higher ranks among us of having ruined Burns by 
their selfish neglect of him. We have already stated 
our doubts whether direct pecuniary help, had it been 
offered, would have been accepted, or could have 
proved very effectual. We shall readily admit, how- 
ever, that much was to be done for Burns ; that many 
a poisoned arrow might have been warded from his 
bosom; many an entanglement in his path cut asun- 
der by the hand of the powerful; and light and heat, 
shed on him from high places, would have made his 
humble atmosphere more genial ; and the softest heart 
then breathing might have lived and died with some 
fewer pangs. Nay, we shall grant farther, and for 
Burns it is granting much, that, with all his pride, 
he would have thanked, even with exaggerated grati- 
tude, any one who had cordially befriended him: 
patronage, unless once cursed, needed not to have 
been twice so. At all events, the poor promotion he 
desired in his calling might have been granted: it 
was his own scheme, therefore likelier than any other 
to be of service. All this it might have been a lux- 
ury, nay it was a duty, for our nobility to have done. 
No part of all this, however, did any of them do; or 
apparently attempt, or wish to do : so much is granted 
against them. But what then is the amount of their 
blame? Simply that they were men of the world, 
and walked by the principles of such men ; that they 
treated Burns, as other nobles and other commoners 
had done other poets; as the English did Shake- 
speare; as King Charles and his Cavaliers did But* 



74 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

ler,^ as King Philip and his Grandees did Cervantes. 
Do men gather grapes of thorns j^ or shall we cut 
down our thorns for yielding only 2^ fence and haws? 
How, indeed, could the "nobility and gentry of his 
native land" hold out any help to this "Scottish 
Bard, proud of his name and country" ?^ Were the 
nobility and gentry so much as able rightly to help 
themselves? Had they not their game to preserve; 
their borough interests to strengthen; dinners, there- 
fore, of various kinds to eat and give? Were their 
means more than adequate to all this business, or less 
than adequate? Less than adequate, in general; few 
of them in reality were richer than Burns; many of 
them were poorer; for sometimes they had to wring 
their supplies, as with thumbscrews, from the hard 
hand; and, in their need of guineas, to forget their 
duty of mercy; which Burns was never reduced to 
do. Let us pity and forgive them. The game they 
preserved and shot, the dinners they ate and gave, 
the borough interests they strengthened, the little 
Babylons they severally builded by the glory of their 
might,'^ are all melted or melting back into the pri- 
meval Chaos, as man's merely selfish endeavors are 
fated to do : and here was an action, extending, in vir- 
tue of its worldly influence, we may say, through all 
time ; in virtue of its moral nature, beyond all time, 
being immortal as the Spirit of Goodness itself; this 
action was offered them to do, and light was not given 

1 Cf. page 1, above. 

2 Cf. Matthew vii. 16. 

3 An echo from Burns's dedication to the first Edinburgh edi- 
tion of his poems. Cf. page 3, above, 

4 Cf . Daniel iv. 30. 






ESSAY ON BURNS. 75 

them to do it. Let us pity and forgive them. But 
better than pity, let us go and do otherioise. Human 
suffering did not end with the life of Burns; neither 
was the solemn mandate, "Love one another, bear 
one another's burdens," ^ given to the rich only, but 
to all men. True, we shall find no Burns to relieve, 
to assuage by our aid or our pity; but celestial na- 
tures, groaning under the fardels of a weary life, we 
shall still find; and that wretchedness which Fate 
has rendered voiceless and timeless is not the least 
wretched, but the most.^ 

Still we do not think that the blame of Burns 's 
failure lies chiefly with the world. The world, it 
seems to us, treated him with more rather than with 
less kindness than it usually shows to such men. It 
has ever, we fear, shown but small favor to its Teach- 
ers: hunger and nakedness, perils and revilings, the 
prison, the cross, the poison-chalice have, in most 
times and countries, been the market - price it has 
offered for Wisdom, the welcome with which it has 
greeted those who have come to enlighten and purify 
it. Homer and Socrates, and the Christian Apostles, 
belong to old days; but the world's Marty rology was 
not completed with these. Roger Bacon and Galileo 
languish in priestly dungeons; Tasso pines in the cell 
of a madhouse; Camoens dies begging on the streets 
of Lisbon.^ So neglected, so "persecuted they the 

^ The first half of this precept occurs eight times in the New 
Testament ; the second only in Galatians vi. 2. 

^ This cry of indignation at the absorption of men in the cares 
of this world, and their indifference to higher things, occurs 
repeatedly in Carlyle. 

^ Every reader should have a clear idea, not necessarily of 
the details in the lives of these men, but of the general signifi- 
cance of each in the history of the world. 



76 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

Prophets,"^ not in Judea only, but in all places 
where men have been. We reckon that every poet 
of Burns 's order is, or should be, a prophet and 
teacher to his age; that he has no right to expect 
great kindness from it, but rather is bound to do it 
great kindness ; that Burns, in particular, experienced 
fully the usual proportion of the world's goodness; 
and that the blame of his failure, as we have said, 
lies not chiefly with the world. 

Where, then, does it lie? We are forced to an- 
swer: With himself; it is his inward, not his out- 
ward, misfortunes that bring him to the dust. Sel- 
dom, indeed, is it otherwise; seldom is a life morally 
wrecked but the grand cause lies in some internal 
mal-arrangement, some want less of good fortune 
than of good guidance. Nature fashions no creature 
without implanting in it the strength needful for its 
action and duration; least of all does she so neglect 
her masterpiece and darling, the poetic soul. Neither 
can we believe that it is in the power of any exter- 
nal circumstances utterly to ruin the mind of a man ; 
nay, if proper wisdom be given him, even so much as 
to affect its essential health and beauty. The stern- 
est sum - total of all worldly misfortunes is Death ; 
nothing more can lie in the cup of human woe: yet 
many men, in all ages, have triumphed over Death, 
and led it captive; ^ converting its physical victory 
into a moral victory for themselves, into a seal and 
immortal consecration for all that their past life had 
achieved. What has been done, may be done again : 
nay it is but the degree and not the kind of such 
heroism that differs in different seasons ; for without 

^ Matthew v. 12; and compare Luke vi. 23. 
2 There is an allusion to Ephesians iv. 8. 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 77 

some portion of this spirit, not of boisterous daring, 
but of silent fearlessness, of Self - denial in all its 
forms, no good man, in any scene or time, bas ever 
attained to be good.^ • 

We have already stated the error of Burns; and 
mourned over it, rather than blamed it. It was the 
want of unity in his purposes, of consistency in his 
aims ; the hapless attempt to mingle in friendly union 
the common spirit of the world with the spirit of 
poetry, which is of a far different and altogether 
irreconcilable nature. Burns was nothing wholly, and 
Burns could be nothing, no man formed as he was can 
be anything, by halves. The heart, not of a mere hot- 
blooded, popular Verse-monger, or poetical Eestauixi- 
teur,'^ but of a true Poet and Singer, worthy of the 
old religious heroic times, had been given him : and he 
fell in an age, not of heroism and religion, but of scep- 
ticism, selfishness, and triviality, when true Nobleness 
was little understood, and its place supplied by a hol- 
low, dissocial, altogether barren and unfruitful princi- 
ple of Pride. The influences of that age, his open, 
kind, susceptible nature, to say nothing of his highly 
untoward situation, made it more than usually diffi- 
cult for him to cast aside, or rightly subordinate; the 
better spirit that was within him ever sternly de- 
manded its rights, its supremacy : he spent his life in 
endeavoring to reconcile these two ; and lost it, as he 
must lose it, v/ithout reconciling them. 

1 This moral is worked out with wonderful power in Sartor 
Rei-artus. 

2 The word means simply restorer ; but Carlyle uses it to de- 
note a man who uses his literary talent merely to give amuse- 
ment, not to inculcate truth. Here again is a veiled sneer at 
Byron and Scott. 



78 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

Burns was born poor; and born also to continue 
poor, for he would not endeavor to be otherwise : this 
it had been well could he have once for all admitted, 
and considered as finally settled. He was poor, truly ; 
but hundreds even of his own class and order of minds 
have been poorer, yet have suffered nothing deadly 
from it : nay his own Father had a far sorer battle 
with ungrateful destiny than his was ; and he did not 
yield to it, but died courageously warring, and to 
all moral intents prevailing, against it. True, Burns 
had little means, had even little time for poetry, his 
only real pursuit and vocation ; but so much the more 
precious was what little he had. In all these exter- 
nal respects his case was hard; but very far from 
the hardest. Poverty, incessant drudgery and much 
worse evils, it has often been the lot of Poets and 
wise men to strive with, and their glory to conquer. 
Locke was banished as a traitor; and wrote his "Es- 
say on the Human Understanding " sheltering himself 
in a Dutch garret. Was Milton rich or at his ease 
when he composed " Paradise Lost " ? Not only 
low,but fallen from a height; not only poor, but im- 
poverished; in darkness and with dangers compassed 
round, he sang his immortal song, and found fit audi- 
ence, though few.i Did not Cervantes finish his 
work, a maimed soldier and in prison? Nay, was 
not the " Araucana, " ^ which Spain acknowledges as 
its Epic, written without even the aid of paper; on 

1 See Paradise Lost, vii. 24-31. 

2 The Araucana is the best of a score of epics written in the 
reign of Philip II. of Spain in imitation of the Italian poets 
Ariosto and Tasso. Its author, Alonso de Ercilla y Zuni^a 
(1533-1595), writes of the Spanish campaigns against the In- 
dians of Arauco, in which he himself took part. The early par '■- 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 79 

scraps of leather, as the stout fighter and voyager 
snatched any moment from that wikl warfare ? 

And what, then, had these men, which Burns 
wanted? Two things; both which, it seems to us, 
are indispensable for such men. They had a true, 
religious princij^le of morals; and a single, not a 
double aim in their activity. They were not self- 
seekers and self -worshippers; but seekers and wor- 
shippers of something far better than Self. Not 
personal enjoyment was their object; but a high, 
heroic idea of Religion, of Patriotism, of heavenly 
Wisdom, in one or the other form, ever hovered be- 
fore them; in which cause they neither shrank from 
suffering, nor called on the earth to witness it as 
something wonderful; but patiently endured, count- 
ing it blessedness enough so to spend and be sjient. 
Thus the "golden-calf of Self-love," however curiously 
carved, was not their Deity; but the Invisible Good- 
ness, which alone is man's reasonable service. This 
feeling was as a celestial fountain, whose streams 
refreshed into gladness and beauty all the provinces 
of their otherwise too desolate existence. In a word, 
they willed one thing, to which all other things were 
subordinated and made subservient; and therefore 
they accomplished it. The wedge will rend rocks; 
but its edge must be sharp and single : if it be double, 
the wedge is bruised in pieces and will rend nothing. 

Part of this superiority these men owed to their 
age; in which heroism and devotedness were still 
practised, or at least not yet disbelieved in; but 
much of it likewise they owed to themselves. With 

of the poem was written in the field, in the manner that Carlyle 
describes. The Araucana is now little read ; and its author is 
no way comparable to the great epic poets of Italy and England. 



80 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

Burns, again, it was different. His morality, in 
most of its practical points, is that of a mere worldly 
man; enjoyment, in a finer or coarser shape, is the 
onl}^ thing he longs and strives for. A noble instinct 
sometimes raises him above this; but an instinct 
only, and acting only for moments. He has no Reli- 
gion; in the shallow age, where his days were cast, 
Religion was not discriminated from the New and 
Old \A^\t forms of Religion; and was, with these, 
becoming obsolete in the minds of men. His heart, 
indeed, is alive with a trembling adoration, but there 
is no temple in his understanding. He lives in dark- 
ness and in the shadow of doubt. His religion, at 
best, is an anxious wish; like that of Rabelais, "a 
great Perhaps." 

He loved Poetry warmly, and in his heart; could 
he but have loved it purely, and with his whole undi- 
vided heart, it had been well. For Poetry, as Burns 
could have followed it, is but another form of Wis- 
dom, of Religion: is itself Wisdom and Religion. 
But this also was denied him. His poetry is a stray 
vagrant gleam, which will not be extinguished within 
him, yet rises not to be the true light of his path, 
but is often a wildfire that misleads him. It was not 
necessary for Burns to be rich, to be, or to seem, 
"independent;" but it was necessary for him to be 
at one with his own heart; to place what was highest 
in his nature highest also in his life; "to seek within 
himself for that consistency and sequence, which ex- 
ternal events would forever refuse him." He was 
born a poet; poetry was the celestial element of his 
being, and should have been the soul of his whole 
endeavors. Lifted into that serene ether, whither he 
had wings given him to mount, he would have needed 






ESSAY ON BUBNS. 81 



no other elevation: jioverty, neglect, and all evil, 
save the desecration of himself and his Art, were a 
small matter to him; the pride and the passions of 
the world lay far beneath his feet; and he looked 
down alike on noble and slave, on prince and beggar, 
and all that wore the stamp of man, with clear recog- 
nition, with brotherly affection, with sympathy, with 
pity. Nay, we question whether for his culture as 
a Poet poverty and much suffering for a season were 
not absolutely advantageous. Great men, in looking 
back over their lives, have testified to that effect. 
"I would not for much," says Jean Paul, "that I 
had been born richer." And yet Paul's birth was 
poor enough; for, in another place, he adds: "The 
prisoner's allowance is bread and water; and I had 
often only the latter." ^ But the gold that is refined 
in the hottest furnace comes out the purest; or, as 
he has himself expressed it, "the canary-bird sings 
sweeter the longer it has been trained in a darkened 
cage." 

A man like Burns might have divided his hours 
between poetry and viutuous industry; industry which 
all true feeling sanctions, nay prescribes, and which 
has a beauty, for that cause, beyond the pomp of 
thrones : but to divide his hours between poetry and 
rich men's banquets was an ill-starred and inauspi- 
cious attempt. How could he be at ease at such ban- 
quets? What had he to do there, mingling his music 

1 Jean Paul Friedrieh Richter (1763-1825) is one of Carlyle's 
favorite authors, and one of those who influenced him most. 
He is the subject of Carlyle's first essay in the Edinburgh Re- 
view (1827), and is treated again in another and a greater essay 
in the Foreign Review (1830). These two papers by Carlyle 
remain among the best accounts of Richter accessible in Eng- 
lish. 



82 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

with the coarse roar of altogether earthly voices; 
brightening the thick smoke of intoxication with fire 
lent him from heaven ? Was it his aim to enjoy life ! 
To-morrow he must go drudge as an Exciseman! 
We wonder not that Burns became moody, indignant, 
and at times an offender against certain rules of soci- 
ety; but rather that he did not grow utterly frantic, 
and run amuch against them all. How could a man, 
so falsely placed, by his own or others' fault, ever 
know contentment or peaceable diligence for an hour ? 
What he did, under such perverse guidance, and 
what he forbore to do, alike fill us with astonishment 
at the natural strength and worth of his character. 

Doubtless there was a remedy for this perverseness; 
but not in others; only in himself; least of all in 
simple increase of wealth and worldly "respectabil- 
ity." We hope we have now heard enough about 
the efficacy of wealth for poetry, and to make poets 
happy. Nay, have we not seen another instance of 
it in these very days? Byron, a man of an endow- 
ment considerably less ethereal than that of Burns, 
is born in the rank not of a Scottish ploughman, but 
of an English peer : the highest worldly honors, the 
fairest worldly career, are his by inheritance; the 
richest harvest of fame he soon reaps, in another 
province, by his own hand. And what does all this 
avail him? Is he happy, is he good, is he true? 
Alas, he has a poet's soul, and strives towards the 
Infinite and the Eternal; and soon feels that all this 
is but mounting to the housetop to reach the stars! 
Like Burns, he is only a proud man; might, like 
him, have "purchased a pocket-copy of Milton to 
study the character of Satan; " for Satan is also 
Byron's grand exemplar, the hero of his poetry, and 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 83 

the model apparently of his conduct.^ As in Burns 's 
case too, the celestial element will not mingle with 
the clay of earth; both poet and man of the world he 
must not be; vulgar Ambition will not live kindly 
with poetic Adoration; he cannot serve God and Mam- 
mon. Byron, like Burns, is not happy; nay he is 
the most wretched of all men. His life is falsely 
arranged: the fire that is in him is not a strong, 
still, central fire, warming into beauty the products 
of a world; but it is the mad fire of a volcano; and 
now — we look sadly into the ashes of a crater, which 
ere lon^: will fill itself with snow ! 

Byron and Burns were sent forth as missionaries 
to their generation, to teach it a higher Doctrine, a 
purer Truth; they had a message to deliver, which 
left them no rest till it was accomplished; in dim 
throes of pain, this divine behest lay smouldering 
within them; for they knew not what it meant, and 
felt it only in mysterious anticipation, and they had 
to die without articulately uttering it. They are in 
the camp of the Unconverted; yet not as high mes- 
sengers of rigorous though benignant truth, but as 
soft flattering singers, and in pleasant fellowship will 
they live there: they are first adulated, then perse- 
cuted; they accomplish little for others; they find no 
peace for themselves, but only death and the peace of 
the grave. We confess, it is not without a certain 
mournful awe that we view the fate of these noble 

1 " I have bought a pocket Milton, which I carry perpetually 
about me, in order to study the sentiments, the dauntless mag- 
nanimity, the intrepid unyielding independence, the desperate 
daring, and noble defiance of hardship in that great personage 
— Satan." — Letter of Burns, quoted in Lockhart, chap. vi. 

Bitter epigrams like this on Byron become a characteristic of 
Carlyle's style in his later writings. 



84 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

souls, so richly gifted, yet ruined to so little purpose 
with all their gifts. It seems to us there is a stern 
moral taught in this piece of history, — twice told us 
in our own time ! Surely to men of like genius, if 
there be any such, it carries with it a lesson of deep 
impressive significance. Surely it would become such 
a man, furnished for the highest of all enterprises, 
that of being the Poet of his Age, to consider well 
what it is that he attempts, and in what spirit he 
attempts it. For the words of Milton are true in all 
times, and were never truer than in this : " He who 
would write heroic poems must make his whole life 
a heroic poem."^ If he cannot first so make his life, 
then let him hasten from this arena; for neither its 
lofty glories, nor its fearful perils, are fit for him. 
Let him dwindle into a modish balladmonger ; let 
him worship and besing the idols of the time, and the 
time will not fail to reward him. If, indeed, he can 
endure to live in that capacity! Byron and Burns 
could not live as idol-priests, but the fire of their own 
hearts consumed them; and better it was for them 
that they could not. For it is not in the favor of 
the great or of the small, but in a life of truth, and 
in the inexpugnable citadel of his own soul, that a 
Byron's or a Burns 's strength must lie. Let the 
great stand aloof from him, or know how to reverence 
him. Beautiful is the union of wealth with favor 

1 Milton's real words are : " I was confirmed in this opinion, 
that he who would not be frnstrate of his hope to write well 
hereafter in laudable things, ought himself to be a true poem ; 
that is, a composition and pattern of the best and honourablest 
things; not presuming to sing high praises of heroic men, or 
famous cities, unless he has in himself the experience and the 
practice of all that which is praiseworthy." — Apology for Smec- 
trpnnuus. 



ESSAY ON BURNS. 85 

and furtherance for literature; like the costliest 
flower-jar enclosing the loveliest amaranth. Yet let 
not the relation be mistaken. A true poet is not one 
whom they can hire by money or flattery to be a min- 
ister of their pleasures; their writer of occasional 
verses, their purveyor of table-wit; he cannot be their 
menial, he cannot even be their partisan. At the 
peril of both parties, let no such union be attempted ! 
Will a Courser of the Sun work softly in the harness 
of a Dray-horse ? His hoofs are of fire, and his path 
is through the heavens, bringing light to all lands; 
will he lumber on mud highways, dragging ale for 
earthly appetites from door to door? 

But we must stop short in these considerations, 
which would lead us to boundless lengths. We had 
something to say on the public moral character of 
Burns ; but this also we must forbear. We are far 
from regarding him as guilty before the world, as 
guiltier than the average; nay from doubting that he 
is less guilty than one of ten thousand. Tried at a 
tribunal far more rigid than that where the Plehis- 
cita of common civic reputations are pronounced, he 
has seemed to us even there less worthy of blame than 
of pity and wonder. But the world is habitually 
unjust in its judgments of such men; unjust on many 
grounds, of which this one may be stated as the sub- 
stance : It decides, like a court of law, by dead stat- 
utes; and not positively but negatively, less on what 
is done right, than on what is or is not done wrong. 
Not the few inches of deflection from the mathemati- 
cal orbit, which are so easily measure-d, but the ratio 
of these to the whole diameter, constitutes the real 
aberration. This orbit may be a planet's, its diame- 
ter the breadth of the solar system; or it may be a 



86 THOMAS CARLYLE. 

city hippodrome; nay the circle of a ginhorse, its 
diameter a score of feet or paces. But the inches of 
deflection only are measured: and it is assumed that 
the diameter of the ginhorse, and that of the planet, 
will yield the same ratio when compared with them ! 
Here lies the root of many a blind, cruel condemna- 
tion of Burnses, Swifts, Rousseaus, which one never 
listens to with approval. Granted, the ship comes 
into harbor with shrouds and tackle damaged; the 
pilot is blameworthy ; he has not been all-wise and all- 
powerful : but to know how blameworthy, tell us first 
whether his voyage has been round the Globe, or only 
to Ramsgate and the Isle of Dogs.^ 

With our readers in general, with men of right 
feeling anywhere, we are not required to plead for 
Burns. In pitying admiration he lies enshrined in 
all our hearts, in a far nobler mausoleum than that 
one of marble; neither will his Works, even as they 
are, pass away from the memory of men. While the 
Shakespeares and Miltons roll on like mighty rivers 
through the country of Thought, bearing fleets of 
traffickers and assiduous pearl-fishers on their waves ; 
this little Valclusa ^ Fountain will also arrest our eye : 
for this also is of Nature's own and most cunning 
workmanship, bursts from the depths of the earth, 
with a full gushing current, into the light of day; 
and often will the traveller turn aside to drink of its 
clear waters, and muse among its rocks and pines. 

1 Shipping ports in southern England. Carlyle is writing from 
the point of view of a Scotchman. 

2 Vaucluse ( Valclusa in Italian) is a town in southeast France 
where the great Italian poet Petrarch (1304-1374) lived for 
some time, and where he did much of his best work. Its foun- 
tain is celebrated in his poems. 



C^e WimiDt Litemtute ^ericjs. 

{Continued.) 
Each regular smgle number, paper, /jr cerits. 

54. Bryant's Sella, Thanatopsis, and Other Poems. 

55. Shakespeare's Mercliant of Venice. Thurber.* *« 

56. Webster's First Bunker Hill Oration, c:,nd the Oration on Adams 

and Jefferson. 

57. Dickens's Christraas Carol.** With Notes and a Biography. 

58. Dickens's Cricket on the Hearth.** 

59. Verse and Prose for Beginners iu Reading.* 

60. 61. The Sir Hoger de Coverley Papers. In two parts.J 

62. John Piske's War of Independence. With Maps and a Biographi- 

cal Sketch. § 

63. Longfellow's Paul Kevere's Ride, and Other Poems.** 

64. 65, 66. Tales from Shakespeare. Edited by Charles and Mary Lamb. 

In three parts. [Also in one volume, linen, 50 cents.] 

67. Shakespeare's Julius Cassar.* ** 

68. Goldsmith's Deserted Village, The Traveller, etc.* 

69. Hawthorne's Old Manse, and A Few Mosses.** 

70. A Selection from "Whittier's Child Life in Poetry.** 

71. A Selection from Whittier's Child Life in Prose.** 

72. Milton's L'Allegro, IlPenseroso, Comus, Lycidas, etc.** 
11, Tennyson's Enoch Ardeu, and Other Poems. 

74. Gray's Elegy, etc. ; Cowper's John Gilpin, etc. 

75. Scudder's George Washington. § 

76. Wordsworth's On the Intimations of Immortality, etc. 

77. Burns's Cotter's Saturday Wight, and Other Poems. 

78. Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield. § 

79. Lamb's Old China, and Other Essays of Elia. 

80. Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and Other Poems; 

Campbell's Lochiel's Warning, and Other Poems. 

Also bound in linen: *25 cents. ** 11 and 63 in one vol., 40 cents; likewise 55 and 
67, 57 and 58, 40 and 69, 70 and 71, 72 and 94. % Also in one vol., 40 cents. § Double 
Number, paper, 30 cents ; linen, 40 cents. 

EXTRA NUMBERS. 

A American Authors and their Birthdays. Programmes and Suggestions 

for the Celebration of the Birthdays of Authors. By A. b. Roe, 
J? Portraits and Biographies of 20 American Authors. 
C A Longfellow Night. For Catholic Schools and Societies. 
J> Literature in School. Essays by Horace E, Scudder. 
.B Harriet Beecher Stowe. Dialogues and Scenes. 

F Longfellow Leaflets. (Each a Double Number, 30 cents ; linen, 

G- Whittier Leaflets. 40 cents.) Poems and Prose Passages for 

H Holmes Leaflets. Reading and Recitation. 

Lowell Leaflets. 

1 The Riverside Manual for Teachers, containing Suggestions and Illus- 

trative Lessons leading up to Primary Reading;. By 1. F. Hall. 

K The Riverside Primer and Reader. (Special Number.) In paper cov- 
ers, with cloth back, 25 cents; in strons; linen bindincr, 30 cents. 

i The Riverside Song Book. Containing Classic American Poems set to 
Standard Music. {DoiihJe Number; so cents ; boards, 40 cents.) 

M Lowell's Fable for Critics. (Doi^ble Number, 30 cents.') 

Hr Selections from Longfellow, Whittier, Lowell, Holmes, Emerson, 
Bryant. Institute Number. 



Cl^e Eibemue literature ^eriesi. 

(Continued.) 
Each regular single number, paper, 15 cents. 
Recent Issues. 

81. Holmes's Autocrat of the Breakfast- Table. {Triple Number, 45 

cents; linen, 50 cents.) With a Biographical Sketch aud Index. 

82. Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales. With an Introductory Note by 

Gkokge Parsons Lathrop. §§ 

83. George Eliot's Silas Marner. With an Introductory Sketch, and 

Notes. § 

84. Dana's Two Years Before the Mast. With a Biographical Sketch, 

and Notes. §§ 

85. Hughes's Tom Brown's School Days. With an Introductory 

Sketch. §§ 
8(). Scott's Ivanhoe. With a Biographical Sketch, and Notes. §§ 

87. Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. With a Biographical Sketch, Notes, and 

a Map. §§ 

88. Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. With an Introductory Sketch of Mrs. 

Stowe's Life and Career. §§ 

89. Swift's Gulliver's Voyage to Lilliput. With an Introductory 

Sketch, Notes, and a Map.** 

90. Swift's Gulliver's Voyage to Brobdingnag. With Notes, and a 

Map.**. 

91. Hawthorne's House of the Seven Gables. With an Introductory 

Sketch. §§ 

92. Burroughs's A Bunch of Heibs, and Other Papers. With an 

Introductory Sketch, and Notes. 

93. Shakespeare's As You Like It. Edited by Richard Grant White, 

and furnished with Additional Notes.* ** 

94. Milton's Paradise Lost. Books I.-III. With an Introduction, and 

Notes.** 

95. 96, 97, 98. Cooper's Last of the Mohicans. With an Introduction 

by Susan Fenimore Cooper, a Biographical Sketch, and Notes. In four parts. 
{The four parts also hound in one volume, linen, bo cents.) 
99. Tennyson's Coming of Arthur, and Other Idylls of the Eing. 
With Introductions and Notes. 

100. Burke's Conciliation with the Colonies. Edited by Robert An- 

dersen, A. M. With an Introduction, and Notes.* 

101. Homer's Iliad. Books I., VI., XXII, and XXIV. Translated 

by Alexander Pope. With Introductions and Notes.* 

102. Macaulay's Essays on Johnson and Goldsmith. Edited by Wil- 

liam P. Trent. With Introductions and Notes.* 

103. Macaulay's Essay on Milton. Edited by William P. Trent. 

With an Introduction and Notes.* 

104. Macaulay's Life and "Writings of Addison. Edited by William 

P. Trent. With an Introduction and Notes.* 

105. Carlyle's Essay on Burns.* 

106. Shakespeare's Macbeth. Edited by Richard Grant White, and 

furnished with Additional Notes by Helen Gray Cone.* ** 
Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. 
Grimm's German Household Tales. 
Also, bound in linen : * 25 cents. ** 72 and 94 in one vol., 40 cents ; likewise 89 
and 90, 93 and 106. § Double number, paper, 30 cents ; linen, 40 cents. §§ Quadruple 
Number, paper, 50 cents ; linen, GO cents. 

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY, 
4 Park Street, Boston ; 1 1 East 17th Street, New York ; 
, -p..» ^,on l'""^^ Adams Street, Chicago. 

LRBMy/o 



